


In Which Ezio is 100% Done with This Shit

by Cards_Slash



Series: Another College AU [1]
Category: Assassin's Creed
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - High School, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, M/M, everyone is dumb
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-07
Updated: 2014-02-28
Packaged: 2018-01-11 12:49:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 40,965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1173268
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cards_Slash/pseuds/Cards_Slash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The way Ezio saw it, the only problem the two of them should have had was how ashamed they should be of how disgustingly in love with the other they were.  Apparently what was glaringly obvious to everyone else <i>in the world</i> was a big mystery to Altair and Malik.  Malik acted like Altair couldn't love anyone and Altair couldn't convince Malik that he loved him.</p><p>Even that would have been fine until Ezio got caught in the middle of the biggest idiots ever born.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> originally inspired by a prompt on the assassin's creed kink meme. upon closer inspection, doesn't really fit the prompt. alas.

Malik was the biggest idiot ever born. 

He had to be, because his insufferably enigmatic roommate and his violently introverted best friend were half naked and panting heavily, making out like fighting with breathy grunts and hushed gasps—on his bed.

\--

Altair was easy to hate. Malik had hated him in kindergarten, he hated him in first grade. He had hated him on the playground when Altair climbed the jungle gym, the trees and then the sheer side of the school and sat perched at the top with his knees against his chest and his fingertips resting on the edge while firefighters and frantic teachers shouted reassuring threats at him.

He hated Altair in gym. He hated him in art. He hated him in social studies and English and Math. 

He hated Altair at after-school dances when the preteen girls fawned over him like dying. He hated him at the science fair when Altair said nothing at all while he stood next to a brilliant display board and won ribbons for achievements he didn’t even care about. 

He hated Altair in orchestra.

He hated him in high school when Malik worked with the yearbook, the literary magazine, the drama club and the debate team but nobody remembered his fucking name. Altair was a ninth-grade loser wearing a white hoodie and gray jeans that talked to nobody and joined nothing and still got voted most likely to succeed in the yearbook when he wasn’t even a qualified entry.

It might have gone on forever—hating Altair was a habit like brushing his teeth—if not for Robert fucking De Sable.

\--

Malik was not likable. His own mother with all of her good intentions still flinched at him when he set into a rant about the pathetic standards of his teachers and fellow students. His own brother pointed out he was _only sixteen, you know_ like it meant he should settle for less. But he’d rather be unlikable than stupid so he stuck by his own standards even when he got bitter and spiteful at the praise of his teachers telling him how his work was _college level_ like it was a compliment.

But now-and-again, he made enemies he didn’t stand a chance against. He’d ripped apart Robert De Sable and his campaign to be high school royalty (president, quarter back, leader of all) in the school newspaper and didn’t bother to make it anonymous. For a fleeting matter of days he was the hero of the school (because who honestly liked Robert by choice? Nobody).

And then he was cornered in the parking lot by three thugs in Letterman jackets. Malik wasn’t weak, he’d taken up running early in his life (and never quit because Altair never quit but persisted with his effortless victories). But he was a skinny little nothing compared to boys with shoulders like barn doors and arms as big as their necks. They had built their bodies to bulldoze and the best Malik could hope for was to outrun them.

Except he was too stupid to run. So they hit him and whispered fierce promises in his ears about how they’d break his face if he ever did anything so stupid again. Malik was left wheezing and coughing on the hard pavement of the parking lot with his phone broken and his book bag spilled out to blow around in the wind. There was blood in his mouth and blood on his face and a burning embarrassment set somewhere in his gut behind the tightening clench of pain where he’d been hit once-twice-three times.

Malik could have recognized Altair by the back of his fucking left ear for all the time he’d spent glaring at the man since kindergarten but he definitely knew him by his shoes when they came around the end of his car and stopped short. “Go away,” Malik said and coughed again, flinched at the pain and the splatter of blood-and-spit that came rolling out of his mouth.

Altair crouched to look at him, eyes narrow and back straight. Then he looked across the parking lot at the three thugs that were toasting their own victory with fist-bumps and phone calls. He shifted his weight like a runner and scooped up the three-inch thick English composition book that had been kicked across the pavement. 

Malik flopped against his car, head pounding and red shame burnt across his face. Altair raced across the pavement—low to the ground fast and silent—and jumped up onto the low bumper of car, across the roof of it and launched himself from the hood onto the back of one of the thugs, reaching out with the book in the other to smash it into a second. The three of them went down hard and only Altair caught himself well enough to roll back to his feet. He stood there staring at the third thug with the phone in his hand and brought his hands up to motion him forward. The thug went to punch him and Altair grabbed his hand, twisted it behind his back and kicked him so hard in the ass that he went sprawling onto the pavement. He reached down to pick up the cell phone and tossed it down the sewer drain before kicking the leader in the ribs and spitting on him.

He came back to Malik with the text book in hand and held it out to him. 

“I didn’t ask for your help,” Malik said.

“Malik,” he said, “you think too highly of yourself.” He dropped the book on the pavement and turned around with his hands in his hoodie pockets to watch the idiot bastards picking themselves off the ground. They stumbled away with bloodied palms and bruised faces. When he was sure they were gone he just left.

\--

Prince Charming didn’t show his face again for a week and when he did, it was a careless collapse of his body in the normally vacant place next to where Malik ate lunch. He’d staked a corner of the courtyard in freshman year and maintained it as his rightful place to sit against the warm brick of the building and eat in peace. 

“What do you want?” Malik demanded.

Altair was stretched out on the ground, legs crossed at the ankle, arms behind his back, hood pulled over his eyes like he didn’t have a care in the world. “Either you’re going to have to learn to fight or you’re going to have to accept I’m not leaving.”

“Those are hardly my only choices.”

Altair tipped his head back to look at him, face drawn up in a sarcastic rebuttal like asking who the hell Malik thought he was kidding. The bruises on his gut weren’t even faded yet since the last time he’d gotten his ass kicked. 

“I didn’t ask for your protection,” Malik snapped. “I won’t be intimidated by a meat head and his three goons.” He would have shoved his books into his bag and stormed away too if not for how Altair went very still. If not for the shadows that blocked the sun and three fucking idiots that had cornered him in the parking lot. If not for Robert fucking De Sable smirking down at him. 

“The least you could do is fight fair,” Robert said, “going sissy for the school psycho doesn’t seem like you, Malik.” But he didn’t say his name right, he never bothered to even try as he drew out the end of his name with an endless roll of ‘eeeees’. 

“Fag,” a couple of the thugs coughed behind him. There was a giggle or three behind that when the people that never bothered to notice him stopped to stare at the scene. The meat heads were grinning and shrugging like it wasn’t their fault that it was true. 

“No comeback?” Robert said.

“I don’t engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed partner,” Malik said. “Did you need a dictionary to read the article I wrote? Did someone summarize it for you?” He was shaking and he couldn’t figure out if it was because he was furious or terrified and decided it didn’t matter so much.

Altair was at his side, laying out like an easy target with his teeth clenched and his lips shut. But Robert was looking at him and not at Malik when he sneered and turned away. Once he was gone, Altair looked back up at him, “skip final period. I’ll teach you how to fight.”

\--

It turned out that the few love-taps the thugs had left him with were nothing at all compared to the unpulled punches that Altair landed on him. He was bruised and aching after an hour of ‘beginner’s basics’ while Altair stood there in his stupid hoodie without so much as a bead of sweat on his forehead. Malik hadn’t gotten in a single hit but had finally managed to block a few.

“Are you psychotic?” Malik asked when they agreed on a break. He was guzzling water while Altair climbed to the top of the fence railing next to where he’d parked the car. 

“No,” Altair said. “I don’t like people. I don’t want to hurt them but if they bother me, I will.” He sprinted across the split rail fence and vaulted off the end of it, tucking his body into a neat roll and coming up at the end on both feet with a victorious smile. “Are you homosexual?”

Malik rubbed the back of his neck, thought about telling Altair all the different ways it was none of his fucking business and then just nodded. “Yes. Not that he knows that, but yes I am.” Except, “that was a terrible way to ask.”

“Worse than waiting until after I had you in an isolated location with limited witnesses to ask if I was a psychopath?” Altair dusted the grass off his hoodie and walked back over to stand next to him.

“I guess it depends on what you’re more afraid of, some other guy finding you attractive or dying.” Malik put his hands by his side but only because he thought if he didn’t Altair would take it like an insult—like Malik was suddenly cold with the fear that he was going to be murdered by a high school kid off his meds.

\--

They made a thing of it, finding empty parks to fight in. Malik got faster but Altair was still faster. Malik got stronger but Altair was still stronger. 

“You’re not trying,” Altair said to him.

Malik’s side was burning with pain and his lungs were seizing from the effort of breathing. He was crouched low to the ground with his head between his knees because there black spots in his vision. “Stop hitting me you fucking asshole!”

“Stop letting yourself get hit.”

Malik’s comeback was an ineffectual grab that left him sprawled out on the ground. Altair sidestepped him and came back, landing with one foot on either side of his chest, folding his body up so it was perched over his chest like a bird. “Get off me,” Malik said.

“I know you hate me. I didn’t know how inept you were.” 

Altair had the good grace to act surprised when Malik punched him in the teeth. They fought like idiots then, rolling in the dirt and slapping and kicking and growling out wordless things until they were filthy and slick with sweat. Altair pinned him to the ground and sat on his gut with both hands holding his in place. 

“I don’t hate you,” Malik said.

“I hate liars,” Altair said back.

“Fine, I _hated_ you. I don’t know what I think of you now. Now get off me.” He expected another fight, thought wearily of how he’d rather just go home and read his books and do his homework like any-other-day. 

But Altair lifted up off him and pulled him to his feet. He dusted him off and looked at him like he was a real God-damned person for the first time he could remember. “I don’t want you to hate me anymore.”

“Stop hitting me in the same two spots and I’ll reconsider your case,” Malik said.

Altair smiled at him and nodded his head. They crawled back to Malik’s car in agreeable silence.

\--

But Robert De Sable was still as much a threat as ever. He won Homecoming King and lauded his victory high over the peasants beneath him. His date was the head cheerleader and his whole posse of meat heads showed up to the Homecoming dance in matching fucking suits to crowd around his-majesty. 

Malik wouldn’t even have gone to the dance if not for Altair mentioning it. He’d thought it was nothing more than a passing interest in social structures (something Altair knew nothing at all about) but some part of him should have known the truth.

Nobody spiked the punch but someone brought liquor and the goons were buzzed and grinning when they found Malik on his way back from the bathroom. Their fists were as big as their fucking faces as they shoved him around, knocked him against the water fountain in the hallway. 

“Where’s your boyfriend? Huh? Where’s your boyfriend?”

Malik pressed his back to the wall and set his teeth and his feet as he watched the three of them. They were tipsy but not drunk, just enough out of it to be unstable on their feet—but not enough to compromise their full strength. He ducked away from them when they moved to hit him, fit between their bodies and took off down the hallway. 

He didn’t see the man that tackled him to the ground, but he felt the impact of his body and the jaw-breaking white pain of hitting the ground without having the time to catch himself. His vision turned black and every thought flew out of his brain like the air shoved violently out of his lungs. It was only the auto-pilot of his body that dragged his limbs into a tight ball of defense before the first punch landed on his back just at the bottom of his ribs. 

(Think, think, think.)

Malik got his elbow in someone’s face and bought enough time to get to his feet. He half turned to take stock of his opponents and only barely had the time to register Robert before he was there with both hands grabbing Malik’s shirt front and shoving him into the tight space between the band room door and the large mural that hung opposite the school theater. His breath was a rancid bloom of fruit punch and alcohol and his eyes were hollowed-out with hate. Malik was pinned and helpless and too fucking stupid for his own good. 

He spit on Robert and got slapped across the face like an unruly-fucking child. Robert was cursing at him when he spun him around and slammed him into the wall but it was someone else that pulled open the heavy band room door and two sets of hands that shoved his arm across the door frame. 

He was nothing but a wild-and-terrified animal in the fast-few-seconds before three idiots with too much loyalty and nothing at all like brains rammed the door shut on his arm. He kicked and screamed and clawed for his freedom and got nothing but the sharp-hard crack of bone.

\--

Malik found Altair in the open area beside the gym. He was standing there in nothing but a white-button down shirt with his tie and jacket thrown on the ground and his hands nervously clenching at his side. 

It was stupid. It was everything stupid he’d ever done-or-said in his life when he stopped six feet away from Altair with his arm hanging heavy and numb at his side and his face split open. He tried to find something to say—something hateful—but his knees were giving out and everything was getting hazy. He thought he was falling but there was a body against his and the smell of Altair too close to his aching face. He said, “I couldn’t. I couldn’t. I cou—” Then the world went black.

\--

Malik woke up to chaos, his parents and brother and police men with questions. He woke up with screws and bolts in his arm and bandages on his face and nurses with pitifully sympathetic faces coming on the hour to ask after his pain and offer him a skinny jug to piss in. He woke up to confinement in a white room and weeks (at least) of recovery and less feeling in his left hand than he remembered from before.

He woke up to the news telling the story of Robert-fucking-De-Sable the nightmare of Castle High who had terrorized and brutalized a younger boy. His face—his so smug face—was splashed across the five o’clock news with an inset of the three other boys that had held him down and hit him. 

And at six there was a video clip of Robert being taken into the police station. There was a cut across his face and a defensive tightness to his shoulders as he ducked his head and bit his lip. The three goons trailed after him like frightened sheep and Malik might have felt sorry for them if he had anything approaching good will left. 

\--

Altair came at the end of the week, looking apologetic about his absence and uncertain of his welcome. He stopped at the doorway of the hospital room and peered inside without knocking. 

“Were you looking for someone else?” Malik asked.

Altair shook his head and stayed exactly where he was. The moment dragged and dragged and then he said, “I’m not useful to you anymore. I wasn’t sure I should come.”

If Malik could have gotten up he would have hit him and instead settled for rolling his eyes and motioning him into the room with his right arm. The endless prattle of daytime TV was an annoying buzz in the background but it was better than listening to call bells and unhappy families that kept the halls busy. The doctor wasn’t due for hours and the nurses were preoccupied with sponge baths and mid-morning meds. “You didn’t turn out to be very useful at all, actually,” Malik said.

Altair frowned at that. He was two feet from the bed when he said, “I found him. And I hurt him and he promised that he’d rot in jail.” He shrugged it off, “that’s not entirely useless.”

If Malik fell in love with Altair (which he did) it started at that exact moment, in his hospital room with Altair offering him a half-smile and a secret that would have been safer unspoken. 

\--

“I just think there are better friends to have,” his mother said.

“He scares me. I mean, he’s cool—do you remember when I was in second grade and he climbed the school and all those firefighters had to come out with the ladder truck to get him? But he just…he doesn’t talk.” Kadar said.

His father muttered something unhappy in Arabic that Malik was happy enough to pretend he didn’t understand. He did understand it but it was better if he thought he didn’t.

Altair stayed though, securely in place at Malik’s left side. He stayed through junior year, through drama club, through working the school newspaper. He stayed through swimming and track. He stayed through exams, through job applications, through applying for colleges. He stayed through senior year when he was voted Most Likely to Succeed (again) and Malik’s name was spelled wrong twice even if he was in the God-damned yearbook club. 

\--

“Let’s go over the rules again,” Malik said. It was a stupid decision to allow himself to be hired at the same place and same time as Altair but there were limited jobs so close to the college. They were a sight to see with their coffee shop greens and smart black aprons but a job was a job.

“Remember to look at people and talk to them. Don’t threaten anyone with violence. Don’t stare at people because it makes me look like a creep.” He raised his fingers in a sarcastic accompaniment to the list. His stupid face had done nothing but gotten more attractive—making him look less like an awkward girl and more like an actual man. He hadn’t gotten broader but taller and with the boxy green shirt on he looked utterly harmless. “Do you remember your rules?”

“Don’t insult anyone’s intelligence until they leave the building. Remember to smile at people so they’ll leave tips. No flirting with the hot guy from B hall.” 

“Good,” Altair said.

\--

“Malik, get your old man ass dressed we are going out!” was how Ezio announced his return to the room they shared. He threw his bag on his bed and pulled his school-day shirt off and dropped it on the floor before sorting through the pile of clean clothes on a different part of the floor to find one that made him look dashing. 

“Frat party?” Malik asked.

“Sorority,” Ezio corrected. “Just because you don’t appreciate the fairer sex doesn’t mean you shouldn’t grasp this opportunity to rejoin the living.” He fixed the buttons of his shirt and disappeared to look at himself in the mirror. 

“So you need a designated driver?” Malik asked.

“Fuck no,” Ezio called back, “I want you to get drunk off your ass and table dance. I don’t know if you know this but women think gay guys are hot.” He came back in the room and spread his arms as if asking how he looked. Malik had run out of synonyms for attractive in the five months he’d known Ezio and finally settled on just nodding his head. Yes Ezio, yes you look good. You’d look good wrapped in dirty newspaper with your finger up your nose. 

“Wait,” Malik said. “Are you actually taking me to a party because you think I’ll help you get laid?”

“I’m not asking you to go steady but I think I could pass for bi-curious and you could have the esteemed honor of having the news of your prowess passed around the school. I’m not saying you have no sex life but you have no sex life, Malik. It hurts me to see you so lonely. So come with me, flirt with me in front of the hot ladies and table dance for them.”

Malik was absolutely one hundred percent not going to do anything of the fucking sort. He opened his mouth to tell Ezio exactly how he wasn’t going to do it too and somehow he found himself saying, “yeah, ok.” Because the last time he’d gotten anything approaching laid had been when that guy at the party fell asleep in the middle of giving him a lackluster hand job. “But if I do, you are not allowed to deny our completely fictional affair.”

“I will swear on my honor that you were the best drunken almost lay I’ve ever had.” He put his hand over his heart to emphasize how serious he was before he started rifling through Malik’s clothes. “But if we’re going you’ll have to look better. I have standards.”

\--

The party was loud and hectic and filled with entirely too many women. Not that Malik had anything against women because he didn’t but he’d never been so incredibly overrun with women in his entire life. What very limited experience he had in crowds of women had usually involved them shoving him out of the way to fawn over Altair about how dashing and strong and wonderful he was while the man ignored their existence with steely resolve.

“You’re adorable,” was kissed into his cheek no less than thirty times before his drink was swapped out for another one. He hadn’t even finished a full fucking cup of beer in the hour he’d been there (not for lack of trying) before he gave up on the attempt and went looking for anywhere quiet to hide. He’d made it less than halfway up the stairs when an arm wrapped around his waist and dragged him back.

Malik jerked his elbow back and only by the grace of Ezio’s reflexes did he manage to escape a broken nose. “Don’t do that!” Malik snapped at him.

“Sorry, sorry,” Ezio said. He had both of his hands up in submissive surrender and stuck his lip out like a pouting child. (There was really no way he’d ever been made to take the blame for anything he did with his ridiculous face and the way his whole body sagged in guilty regret and humblest apology. Unless his mother was made of iron and steel, she wouldn’t have been able to remember why she was mad.) “I was looking for you,” and he stepped closer when he saw a tight cluster of women moving closer to them with red solo cups in hand and phones in the other. His voice dropped from normal-speaking to surely-seducing. “It’s very hard to start rumors about how sexy I find you when I can’t even find you.”

“I was under the impression it wasn’t hard to start rumors at all.” God knows there had been enough of them started about him throughout the years. It seemed as if they sprang to full life from nothing and persisted on for years.

“Can I touch you?” Ezio asked him. (He looked legitimately afraid of doing so.) He was even closer now, with the whole attractive stink of his laundry soap and body spray and the ridiculously attractive tilt of his smile. When Malik nodded his hand slid around his waist and the other set against his chest. “Rumors only work so well when they’re started by the right people.” He ducked his head in so they were close enough to taste each other’s breath. “You were supposed to be secretly charming. Now it just looks like I’m trying maul you while you play dead.”

“I suppose that says a lot about my sex life,” Malik mumbled back. 

Ezio laughed like he was the cleverest person in the world and then looked back at him like he was waiting for more.

“You said nothing about flirting.” Because Malik was terrible at it. He shifted his body and leaned his weight in toward Ezio, dropped his voice a little lower and tried his best to make it look like he was working on wiggling his way into the man’s pants. “Not all of us were blessed with the power of bullshit, Ezio.”

“You say such sweet things.” Ezio went red like blushing embarrassment before he stepped away and left him standing there blinking at the empty space where he used to be. 

Malik would have hunted him down and slaughtered him but there were three girls there staring at him, sharing strange glances at one another before turning away and going back the way they came.

\--

Malik found the yard after escaping the crush of bodies bouncing to music in the front room. He was searching for fresh hair but found a thick den of pot smokers instead. They offered him a joint and he sat with them for a while listening to their broken mumbles about the wrongs of the world. 

“Hey,” one of the girls in the group said when she took the joint from him. “I heard you were trying to make Ezio bat for the other team.”

“No harm in trying,” Malik said because bursting into giggles and rolling on the ground at the very image of him trying to seduce Ezio fucking Auditore would have blown his cover. “You can’t blame me.”

“I’d fuck him blind,” she said and raised her joint like toasting him before she stuck it back between her lips and took a drag.

\--

Ezio found him between the bathroom and the open bar in the kitchen. He planted his whole body in Malik’s path and made sure his presence was acknowledge before he wrapped both of his hands around Malik’s body and stepped two steps back to press his own body against the wall. One of his hands slid up Malik’s back and pulled him closer so that his drunken-feet were shuffle-shuffling right up to stand between the slut-sprawl of Ezio’s legs.

“Do you even need me for this?” Malik mumbled. He put his right hand on the wall and set his left hand on Ezio’s waist. His fingers and palm still didn’t always listen to him or communicate important signals to his brain. It was best to touch Ezio without actually feeling him because his guard was down and his dick was lonely and it would have been a worthless disaster. 

Ezio laughed with their faces so close together they might as well been kissing. “Stick with me. I guarantee a one hundred percent improvement in your sex life.” 

Oh but he looked good in the dim light of the hallway with his sly smile and his lazy fuck-me drawl. Malik had a thousand dirty thoughts dancing around his head when he laughed and leaned his head in to kiss Ezio on the cheek right over the brilliant bloom of blush. “You’re so selfless.”

\--

Altair was never ‘in the loop’. Altair lived outside of the loop and almost entirely outside the scope of humanity. Anything he heard that wasn’t based in recorded fact was tuned out like white noise. It was entirely possible that someone, somewhere on campus mentioned the fact that Malik was chasing after Ezio like a dog in heat but even if they’d written it on cue cards and sang it in song while re-enacting it, Altair would have been just as clueless.

Malik thought about telling him (tried to guess if Altair would even care, if he’d tell him there were better uses of his time) and never got around to actually doing it.

\--

Ezio was not a normal person. He had appeared in Malik’s life by chance and a random dorm room assignment algorithm. There had been no initial or lingering weirdness about Malik’s arm, nationality or sexuality. In fact, Ezio had showed up and thrown his stuff on the bed and fallen asleep without bothering to introduce himself, woke up the next morning and offered to get breakfast. There had never been weirdness.

But nobody (except strange women with broken hearts) had ever taken to Altair. They had never made it past the first stunted and painful attempt at conversation with the man before they decided it was just better to use Malik as a translator. 

Except Ezio who coaxed Altair into tolerating him through liberal use of spicy food and video games. The two of them had spent hours laying across the dorm beds slaughtering hundreds in Call of Duty games. 

\--

Malik’s sex life didn’t improve but the number of interested parties increased exponentially. (Because really, any number was bigger than zero.) 

“What did that man want?” Altair asked him when he appeared out of thin air, looking after another man’s retreating back before looking down at the blue scrawl of numbers on Malik’s hand. “Are you working on a project?”

Malik snorted at that. “He gave me his number. It’s a thing that people do.”

“Oh.” Altair said. Then he shook it away. “You should come running with me tonight. You’re getting slow again.”

Malik punched him and Altair stood still enough to let him. “He might not be working on a project but I am and tonight is the only night Ezio isn’t going to be in the room. I need to take advantage of the quiet and space while I’ve got it.” 

“Tomorrow?”

Malik nodded. “Yes, fine.”

\--

Ezio dressed him in some ridiculous combination of clothing before he dragged him to another party with a dozen attractive girls that took up a massive sectional while they talked so fast their words bled together with the sound of their laughs. They had their phones out and their red-cups full of something to warm their bellies and dull their common sense.

Malik was three-fourths drunk off his ass when he climbed on the table and kicked the magazines and trash to the floor. They were aghast with annoyance at him until the music they hadn’t even been listening to turned sultry and slow and he started moving his body in time with it.

Ezio stood in the doorway and stared at him like the thought he could actually dance hadn’t even occurred to him when he all but begged Malik to do it. His mouth was open in honest shock and his hand went slack and loose around the cup of crystal-clear moonshine. 

They were all watching him, every single person in the room and Malik felt his skin get hot and his body start to shiver. He felt stupid but powerful as he twisted to the music until the sweat was dripping out of his hair and soaking into the neckline of his shirt.

\--

“I’m not doing it again,” Malik flat out told Ezio three days later. “There isn’t a single person on this campus that doesn’t suddenly think I’d have sex with anyone. There was some guy today that asked me to make a porn with him—amateur stuff, he said. We’d split the royalties, he said.”

Ezio looked up from the book he’d been reading, struck dumb with a pencil between his teeth and a litter of half-covered pages spread out around him. “Did you take him up on it?”

“No!” Malik shouted at him.

“Alright, alright. I won’t ask you to go again.” The easy way he gave in should have told Malik that he had no intention of keeping his word. But he was too preoccupied with the blatant attention that followed him everywhere he went or the easily extended offers for random, singular sexual encounters. 

\--

Altair lived in the dorms because he’d insisted to his grandmother that it was an important part of the college experience. He’d pointed out that the social interactions he’d be able to take part in would be invaluable to his maturity. (Or, he’d come to Malik and said, I want to stay in the dorms and you have to help me convince my grandmother. Malik had written the speech and Altair had memorized and delivered it.) He lived there but the kid that was designated his roommate had all but moved out. 

“Did you even introduce yourself?” Malik had asked him once. Altair said that he had but there was no actual proof that he’d done more than perch at the head of his bed and glare at the stranger that tried to take up half the space of the room.

It was convenient now because Malik could catch a ride home with Altair and crash at his room because the effort of walking the rest of the way across campus to his own room was unthinkable. 

“I just remembered why I stopped staying at your place,” Malik mumbled. The early-morning alarm was chirping like a fucking bird at least forty minutes before the sun had even bothered to waking its dumb ass up. And then there was Altair--long and slim--tight to Malik’s back with his arm slung over his body and the foggy dampness of his breath up against his neck. He wasn’t sleeping because his breath was too suspiciously silent but he hadn’t bothered to get up and turn off the alarm. “Turn it off.”

Altair stretched up to turn off the alarm and settled back into place behind him--fully aware that spooning your best friend was not something normally done. He’d even been informed on multiple occasions that a person normally asked before they cuddled someone in their sleep. He had seemed to grasp these concepts but he’d also pointed out that none of Malik’s objections had anything to do with not wanting Altair to spoon him. “You should come running with me.”

“I’ll just slow you down.” 

“So we’ll practice endurance, not speed.” Altair’s arm around his chest tightened to close the very nearly non-existent gap between their bodies before he shifted up to lay across Malik’s left arm and stare down at him with his stupidly pathetic face. “You used to practice with me all the time.”

“That was when I still thought I could beat you. I’ve accepted the inevitability of my own defeat.” He rolled onto his back and rubbed his left elbow where it started to tingle and Altair laid half on his chest and massaged his left hand. “If I go are you going to buy me breakfast?”

“Yes.” 

Malik groaned out a curse and shoved Altair off him. He stumbled-toward the bathroom to wash his face and remind himself he couldn’t molest his best friend. (Mostly the last one.)

\--

At some point, some part of his brain must have told him that doing anything involving Altair and ‘endurance’ would be bad for his health. (That was to say, anything that didn’t involve a distinct lack of clothing and a much more private venue.) Malik was still sweating when he dragged himself up the steps to his dorm room. His clothes were soaked and his hair was soaked and every muscle in his body was reprimanding him for falling back into the stupid trap of trying to out-do Altair.

(Or even, in this instance, just trying to keep up with him.)

The sight of the open dorm door was immediately disheartening. And then there was the slightly out-of-tune strumming of that old guitar Ezio insisted he was learning how to play. Then there was the shuffle-scuffle of another body moving around in the room and Malik just heaved a sigh as he stopped in the doorway. His bed was thankfully untouched (Ezio continued to be more considerate than Altair, if only because he didn’t allow people to sit on Malik’s bed and Altair constantly let him sleep on the absent roommate’s bed and then crawled over to spoon him). But Leonardo was sitting at Ezio’s neglected desk with his passive-little smile on his face and a rosy redness to his cheeks that meant he’d been there long enough to start bawling with laughter at Ezio’s stupid jokes.

“Oh my God,” Ezio said.

“Don’t,” Malik said. He gave up on the idea of taking a nap and dragged his sore, smelly, sweaty ass to the shower. By the time he got out, Ezio had given up on the guitar but had moved on to getting dressed to leave the room while he told Leonardo all about how he had heard there was a new Italian place in time that claimed to be the most authentic, freshest and best. 

“I don’t know,” Leonardo said, “last time I went to an Italian place with you, we were kicked out after you started mocking the wait staff in Italian.”

Malik considered pointing out the Olive Garden debacle but decided it wasn’t worth it and instead collapsed face first into his bed. He waved a grateful hand in Ezio’s direction when the man asked if he wanted the door shut when he left and fell asleep in the crushing silence that followed his departure.

\--

“You’re an idiot,” was the only blessing that Malik had to offer when Ezio decided to convince Altair to show him (or teach him) how he did ‘that trick where he climbed walls’. And Altair who had nothing better to do with his time, dragged them out to the library on the basis that it had the best bricks for climbing. 

“You’re going to climb that?” Ezio said. His head was cocked to one side as he stared at the pillars and the bricks and the decorative bits that stuck out an inch or so farther than the face of the building. “You’re actually going to climb it?”

Altair nodded his head. He was wearing his white hoodie (because it was good luck or simply out of habit. He always wore it when he did dumb shit). “It’s not as hard as you are making it out to be.”

“I can’t imagine it not being hard,” Ezio said. He took a step back and cupped his hand around his face and then shook his head. “There’s no way.”

“He can do it,” Malik bothered to say since he’d been dragged along to witness the grand-and-glorious feat. He had a paper that was due in less than a week so the proximity to the library was a benefit. There was a bench situated with a great view of where Altair was planning to climb the building and if he had brought along his notes and the most recent rough draft to go over (again) Altair wouldn’t even get annoyed at him. Malik’s presence was the important part, not the fullness of his attention.

Still, he sat there with his chin on his hand watching the stupid bastard scale the building. He had always been tall and thin, always stronger than a fucking ox with the ability to contort his body in ways that seemed impossible. He had taken up climbing at birth (apparently) and had never missed an opportunity to get somewhere higher since. 

“I cannot fucking believe it,” Ezio said. 

“Give it a few more months and you’ll believe he can do anything,” Malik said. 

“Did you see that?” Ezio shouted. He was crowing like a fan at a football game, waving his arms around and shouting up at Altair about how he was unbelievable and awesome. When the man was back on the ground and dusting the red chalk grit off his clothes, Ezio dragged him into a one-armed hug and smothered him in congratulations and questions. Altair folded under the intensity of Ezio’s admiration and blushed as he tried to play off his accomplishments as nothing but luck.

\--

Every now-and-again, Malik realized he was in a long term relationship with a man that probably would never realize sex was more than an abstract social activity and that love itself was not fictional but a real (and painful) phenomenon. Loneliness had a way of sneaking up on him and kneeing him in the balls—

Like walking past a couple holding hands or having to watch an endless parade of couples on first dates filing through the coffee shop on their way to-or-from. He hated their hopeful smiles and the daring closeness of their bodies. He detested the newness of their relationships and the shivering uncertainty of their orders. They were so caught up in the anxiety of making good impressions that they couldn’t even figure out what to drink. And then there were the ones that floated through the door on a little cloud and oozed a trail of sickening-sweet goo behind them as the power of their love and utter devotion turned the whole rest of the world into a cruel mockery of a real thing. 

Altair didn’t notice and didn’t care, just made the drinks and handed them out to the waiting patrons. He smiled now-and-again when someone looked at him or said his name. It was the only thing his grandmother had ever managed to get through to him. 

(Just smile, she always said. You’re so handsome. If you just smile. You don’t have to talk. Just smile.)

But Malik hated date nights more than he’d ever hated anything in the world. So that when he turned down Altair’s offer of movies and smuggled drinks and found himself walking in on Ezio fixing his hair for another late-night tour of the sorority houses, his defenses were gone and his bitter hatred of his own stupidity was high. 

“You alright?” Ezio asked him.

“You still want me to go pretend to find you attractive?” Malik asked. Because his heart hadn’t ever given up loving Altair but his body was fucking lonely. 

\--

Ezio was easy to gawk at. He was easy to seduce in a crowd and the quick-slip of his shy-sly smile always made Malik’s pulse do strange things in his throat. His skin was hot as God-damned fire when Malik snuck a hand under his shirt while they danced. Everything was a perfect mimic of the real thing when Malik was drunk enough to not give a fuck.

There was no table to dance on but there were plenty of bodies to grind against. Somewhere along the line he’d traded his shirt for another drink and had forgotten where he put it. He’d forgotten about the scars on his arm and the asymmetrical way the left had never quite caught up to the right no matter how much therapy he’d done. It didn’t seem to matter to the hands that were all over his bare skin. 

It didn’t matter one fucking bit to Ezio at his back with his stupid hand on Malik’s stomach as they danced together just to impress the wide-eyed sorority women. It was a blonde woman that worked her way between them this time, and Ezio couldn’t have bothered to see anything in the world except for her pretty face. 

That was fine, Malik was just as good at dancing by himself. The more he danced, the greater the legend grew and the more people that knew him by name-and-reputation, the more likely he was to get laid. 

But then, Altair with both of his hands catching Malik’s elbows and pushing him backward through the crowd. His face was an unrecognizable mask—something not entirely human. (Not so very different than the boy he’d been so long ago, standing outside the gym when Malik hobbled up to him with a broken arm.) He didn’t stop pushing until Malik’s tripped over the threshold of a door and nearly fell onto the hard pavement patio outside. A few people objected to being stepped on (or discovered) but Altair kept shoving him until there was grass.

“Stop it!” Malik shouted at him.

“What are you doing?” Altair demanded. Like he hadn’t heard a thing, like he had every right to shove Malik around. 

“Dancing.”

“Where is your shirt?”

“I don’t know,” Malik said. He was drunk-enough and not nearly collected enough to dissect the way he was being stared at like he was an alien. Out in the after-midnight air the sweat on his skin turned clammy and cold. “What is your problem?”

“You said you were going home.”

“I did,” Malik said. “Ezio asked me to—”

“You said you had to study. That you were going to sleep.” Altair was furious and it came out in white-knuckled fists and perfect-posture. It was there in the clipped, tight, strangeness of his words when he said them. 

“Well, I forgot I told Ezio that—”

Altair shoved him with both hands on his chest and waited until the last second to grab his wrist to keep him from falling. “I hate liars.” He stood there another second to be sure Malik wasn’t going to fall over and then pushed both of his hands into his hoodie pockets and turned to walk away. 

“Fuck!” Malik shouted at nobody. 

\--

Nobody gave the cold shoulder the way Altair did. Malik hadn’t been so completely ignored since freshman year of high school. (Even then, really, Altair had been there to notice him and be effortlessly better than him.) It would have been easy to chalk it up to nothing more than paranoia if not for the fact that Altair called out sick at work and was not in his dorm room when Malik went to check on him.

So—ignored.

\--

“I took Altair out for Chinese once,” Ezio said. They were waiting for their orders at the scratched-and-dented bar at the cheapest Chinese take-out place they could walk to. “You weren’t there—some test or something and he showed up and stood in the doorway for like five minutes and didn’t say anything. And this wasn’t like after I knew that he just never talked because he’s really bad at it. I thought he was your stalker or something. I said something to him and he looked at me like he hadn’t even realized I was there and I said you’d be back in a while. He just sat down. So I said, why not go get something to eat and take your stalker with me. He nodded and followed me and waited in line with me. The first thing he ever said to me was, ‘Malik is _my_ friend.’ And that was weird.” Ezio accepted his order when the lady handed it over and declined sauces before turning back to look at Malik. “I mean everything about Altair is weird. But the way he said it, you know. Like he thought I was a threat.”

“Is there a point to this story?” Malik asked. (He’d heard a lot of stories about how Altair introduced himself poorly to new people.)

“The point is, Altair threatened to break my fingers two days ago. I told him that you and I were just pretending because I wanted to get laid. I explained the whole thing about being fake bi-curious.”

“He did what?” Malik demanded.

“Yeah. But that’s not the point in the story,” Ezio said. He waited until after Malik had his own food in hand and was looking at him before he said, “the point is—at what point are you going to finally tell him that you’re so in love with him you can’t sleep when he hasn’t been around?”

Malik considered denying it. He considered calling the whole idea stupid. He even considered insulting Ezio’s intelligence (because that would not even be a preposterous notion) but the facts remained. “It’s not like I’ve ever tried to hide it.”

“I know.” Ezio motioned them back toward the door and waited until they were outside. “But this is _Altair_.”

“Just leave it.”

“My fingers, Malik. He threatened to break my fingers. He didn’t even tell me why he was breaking my fingers, he just shoved him into the men’s bathroom and pinned me against the wall by the urinals and told me that he was going to break my fingers. So leaving it is not really in my best interest. I need you to do something about him.”

“I’ll talk to him.”

“About how you want to fuck him blind,” Ezio said. He was grinning again, because anything involving sex left him as giddy as an idiot. 

\-- 

In the very wildest of Malik’s midnight fantasies, Altair had discovered his own inner wealth of eternal love and passionately declared his undying feelings before carting Malik off to a convenient horizontal surface. The more rational ones involved Malik telling Altair and Altair nodding agreeably.

But in high school, Malik said, “do you ever thing about dating?”

Altair had looked at him as if he were insane. He said, “my grandmother thinks I should date someone. She says it’s an important part of the ‘growing up process’. I don’t understand why it’s important.”

\--

The trouble with finding Altair to talk to him about how he couldn’t randomly go off and threaten to break someone’s fingers was that Malik was being currently Ignored and therefore didn’t stand a chance at finding Altair. He put effort into it, checked the usual haunts and Altair’s classes when he could catch them letting out and even called his grandmother and chatted to her casually. 

“Oh,” she said as soon as Malik asked her if her grandson had been remembering to call her. “So that’s why he didn’t say much.”

For a person that talked as little and as infrequently as Altair, the notion of ‘not talking much’ was almost unthinkable. Malik just sighed into the phone and rubbed the back of his neck. “Any idea where I can find him?”

Her laugh was sweet even at a distance but she still said, “You should know by now that I don’t. Give him a little time. All of these things are hard for him, you know.” 

Malik didn’t have proof but suspicion that even if she had known, Altair’s grandmother would rather have died than give up the information about where to find her grandson. Many people had tried and failed miserably to get Altair’s trust and anyone that had it was loathed to do anything to damage it.

So he was resolved to wait it out. As long as Ezio’s fingers remained intact and Malik moved in predictable patterns the whole thing would blow over as nothing more than another unusual bump in the road.

\--

Then there was Altair flat on his naked back on the bed with both of his hands on Ezio’s bare skin breathing flushed breaths back into Ezio’s mouth. Malik didn't even wait for an explanation, didn't bother to start shouting, he just slammed the door after him as he left.


	2. Chapter 2

It was a well-known fact (according to his older brother) that Ezio had been born with bigger balls than brains and that he was more likely (according to his own mother) to put his balls to use than his brains. Even his father—his own father—had sat him down in the parlor of the house and looked at him very sternly and said, 

“Son, I am not sending you to college to get an education in the variety of available vaginas.”

Ezio supposed, as the dorm door slammed shut and Altair shoved him away so fast he landed on his face against the floor, that his parents would be proud of him. He’d gone off and fucked up everything and there wasn’t a single vagina to blame (for once).

\--

Altair was like a bird of prey, a pure predator, and it was the sort of thing that made a person instantly more attractive and infinitely more frightening simultaneously. Some people made it work for them, some people did not. Ezio didn’t have a terribly invested opinion about whether or not Altair made his homicidal reputation look good or if he wore it around his shoulders as a means to keep people the fuck away from him.

Ezio did not have a choice about Altair. Altair existed in the same small sphere of space that Malik did and Malik existed as Ezio’s roommate. So the choice to befriend Altair was good-common-sense and survival instincts combined.

\--

Still, Altair could make homemade brownies in a microwave. Nobody truly evil could create delicious-and-gooey chocolate perfection in a coffee cup, and even if someone evil could, they would haven’t passed it out to anyone close enough to catch the scent. 

Altair also knew French. He didn’t know Arabic which made him glare hatefully at Malik’s back whenever he was on the phone with his father. His whole body just tensed up and his knees crept higher and higher toward his chest until he was balanced on the balls of his feet on the edge of the chair with his arms out at his sides like he was going to leap forward and tackle-grab the phone from Malik. (He hadn’t, yet, but the threat seemed real nonetheless.)

Altair liked spicy things and Ezio was ambivalent about them but he was more than willing to feed the man jalapeno peppers and spicy curry in exchange for a greater feeling of safety. 

“Do you play this,” Altair asked him when he discovered the game system under his bed. He found the box of games with it and went through them until he stopped at one that deserved enough attention that he flipped it over to read the back. 

“Sometimes,” Ezio said, “do you play?” 

“I use to.” And that was how they started playing video games on the cramped-small screen that sat on Ezio’s desk. In those long-and-short hours of nothing but animated gunfire and aching thumbs, Altair’s whole body loosened up like unwinding and he sprawled out on Malik’s bed without a fucking care in the world (except save points and extra ammo).

\--

Then there was the plan where he used Malik to get laid. The brilliant plan that he’d thought out in the shower because:

1\. Malik was hot, even for a guy that spent all of his time wearing creases into his forehead as he stared angrily at old books. There was just something about the angle of his jaw and the intelligence of his eyes and the constant bedhead that made him attractive.

2\. Malik was convenient because he was close by, unattached and secretly dying to become reckless in new and interesting ways. His slight tendency to be self-conscious about his left arm (the story about which Ezio had never been told or asked after) aside, Malik was the sort of person that just needed the opportunity to show off before auto-pilot arrogance took over.

3\. Malik was actually gay and therefore would not be offended when Ezio asked him to pretend to be gay with him and then let Ezio have all of the beautiful ladies. 

The idea had been brilliant in its simplicity. He had even rehearsed several different conversation starters to convince Malik to go along with it. (There was no power more awe-inspiring than Malik’s ability to tear an argument to pieces within seconds.) In the end, he didn’t even have to try hard and the whole plan worked just as wonderfully as Ezio imagined it would. It would have been _perfect_ if not for how Ezio had neglected to take into account the most important thing.

\--

Ezio had never been more afraid for his life and limbs than when Altair cornered him and threatened to break his fingers. He’d babbled out a litany of excuses for how he’d used Malik for his own purposes but it had all been for show and none of it mattered. 

Altair shifted away from him, eyebrows drawn in tight and hands thankfully shoved into the pockets of his hoodie. He looked more pissed (possibly) than he had before but with an added helping of completely confused. He said, “I didn’t tell you why.”

“What?” Ezio asked. He wasn’t going to argue the point because nobody who had ever met Altair doubted the man was capable of breaking bones (both physically and mentally). Somewhere in the rush of adrenaline his mind was sure that Malik’s name had been used in conjunction with the threat.

“I said, I’m going to break your fingers, Ezio. Then you started telling me about how you weren’t trying to sleep with Malik. I never said anything about him.” 

It was at this point that Ezio put his hands behind his back because there was a blank space in his head where his brain was supposed to be and he really liked both of his hands like they were. “Uh?”

“How did you know it was about Malik?” 

Oh, right, because Ezio was blind, deaf and stupid and hadn’t noticed anything at all in the past several months. He had no idea that Altair and Malik were attached at the breast bone and that no harm—imagined or otherwise—could be brought on one without the other jumping in immediately to defend them. “Oh, I just—well, he was upset after the last time we went out so I thought that he was angry at me about the whole idea and you know how you two…are.”

Altair kept glaring at him.

“I mean why else would you break my fingers?” Ezio did not want to know the answer to that.

Altair kept glaring at him.

“I’ll apologize to him?”

“He’s a grown man,” Altair said. It didn’t sound like he was talking to Ezio, precisely, just that he was putting that fact out in the world at large. (Excuse me world, Malik is actually a grown person capable of taking care of himself.) 

“Well yeah. I didn’t mean he wasn’t. But it was still my idea and I didn’t know it was upsetting him or I wouldn’t have agreed to let him go. I mean he said he wanted to quit and then the last time he just volunteered—” 

Then Altair turned around and punched the mirror. He stood there with his shoulders shaking from going so tight while his blood streaked down the cracked mirror. There was a gash across the top of his knuckles and blood drops hitting the floor. 

“Fuck!” Ezio shouted.

Then Altair turned around and looked at him. “He’s not mad at you. He’s mad at me because I found him drunk and dancing with women after he told me he was busy. Then he lied to me.” And the fact that Altair could have just broken his own hand seemed to be entirely unworthy of note. “Don’t tell him about this,” Altair mumbled.

“Wait,” Ezio said. And he caught at the back of Altair’s hoodie when he tried to leave. There was an idea dawning somewhere behind the disbelieving terror about the whole encounter. “He blew you off and you’re this mad about it?”

“So?”

Ezio let him go because there were people somewhere in the world capable of explaining love to Altair and then there was him—dizzy from adrenaline in the men’s bathroom with his fingertips still conspicuously cold from being threatened. 

\--

Leonardo was not his closest friend. He was not his oldest friend either. He was, however, Ezio’s smartest friend. He was the smartest person that Ezio had ever met. (Also he was almost certainly gay and therefore might be able to empathize with the dilemma better.)

“What do you do when you’re between two guys that are in love with one another but don’t realize the other one feels the same?” Ezio asked. “Assume that for one reason or another you can’t tell them what the other feels about them.” 

Leonardo turned away from the screen of his computer to make sure Ezio wasn’t throwing out insane ideas without reason. He must have decided it was an actual question because he thought for half a second and then said, “get out of the way.”

“What if getting out of the way is an actual impossibility?” Ezio asked.

“It’s not impossible. Is it unlikely that you’re going to do it? Yes. But it’s not impossible to do it. There’s always a way to make something work. And if the situation is as dire as you say it is, you really shouldn’t be involved in it.” 

Because you’ll get your hand broken and that was only what Altair was already planning on doing. God knows what else he could come up with. Ezio groaned and pressed his head against Leonardo’s shoulder in defeat. “If I do not make it out of this alive, I give all my worldly possessions to you.”

“Stay out of it,” Leonardo said again. “Listen to reason for once.”

\--

There was no reason in the space between Malik and Altair. There was silence and a strange disconnect where all the right signals translated from ‘desperately in love’ to ‘indifferent but friendly’. 

Malik was unreasonable and hurt, pig-headed enough to act like he didn’t care Altair wasn’t talking to him (for _days_ ) and Altair wasn’t capable of expressing himself well enough to do more than rub at the bandage over his busted knuckles and glare at blank space.

“Maybe you should just talk to him,” Ezio gently suggested whenever Altair showed up when he knew Malik wouldn’t be there just to sit and play video games with him. The conspicuous difference being that Altair sat on the floor and didn’t look-at-or-touch Malik’s bed. “You know, maybe let him explain what he was thinking.”

“He lied to me.”

“And you’re going to be angry forever? I don’t think that’s the best idea. I mean, this cannot be the first time that Malik has ever lied to you, right?” (Oh, God, but it really could have been). “Even if it is, you have to give him the chance to explain.”

“I don’t want to hear him explain that he just wanted to have sex.” Altair got shot in the video game and threw the control across the room and shoved himself up to his feet. “I don’t know why you are talking about this.”

“You threatened to break my fingers!” Ezio shouted. It was just not the sort of thing that a person easily forgot. “And it’s not like you’ve got a line of people waiting to listen to you talk about your feelings so let’s pretend that I think of you as a friend and I don’t like to see you upset. Also that I really don’t like someone throwing my controllers around.”

Altair crossed his arms over his chest and clenched his teeth hard enough it made the muscles in his jaw go taut and shivery. His resolute stare was anything but reassuring but he hadn’t bolted out the door (or window) yet. 

“Why don’t you just tell him that you’re in love with him?” Ezio asked.

And in that moment, Altair decided he was an idiot incapable of logic. He walked out without so much as an eyeroll.

 

\--

 

Malik was worthless too.

“Have you heard from Altair yet?” Ezio asked.

“No.” Just like how Malik wasn’t mouthing off about how much smarter he was, or how nobody knew how to use the card catalogue or how the people in his class were wasting their parent’s money by paying for courses they slept through. Malik wasn’t even sleeping right, just sitting on his bed frowning at the books he wasn’t reading.

“Maybe you should call him, leave a message, tell him that you’re sorry about whatever you did.”

Malik waved his hand in the air. “Wouldn’t help. I lied to him. He’ll come back and tell me I’m a jerk and we’ll fight and it’ll be fine.”

Right, yeah, but it was hard to believe something that Malik didn’t seem like he believed himself.

\--

 

Altair came back during Malik’s early morning class and yanked Ezio’s blankets off his bed and stood there without so much as batting an eye to find him naked. “I don’t know how to tell him. He wouldn’t believe me.”

Ezio groaned angrily into his pillow and tried to grab his blankets back only to fall gracelessly onto the floor when Altair moved out of grabbing range at the last second. He crawled into the bathroom with a half-muttered command that Altair should remain. By the time he came out again--dressed in yesterday’s pants--Altair had perched himself on the desk chair with the blankets balled up and pressed to his chest. “We need ground rules,” Ezio said, “if you’re going to show up before nine AM with a raging case of insecurity with plans to assault me I need you to bring breakfast and coffee drinks. I like both cream and sugar in mine.”

“He hated me for years,” Altair said. 

“That’s just his face,” Ezio said. He sat on the end of his bed and scratched at the dirty tangle of his hair with a grim frown. There was a day and a half worth of stubble on his face and his mouth tasted like the bottom of a dirty trashcan. (All he wanted was to go back to sleep.) “Just--you have to talk to him.”

“I’ve tried!” Altair said. 

Ezio rubbed his face with both hands and mumbled something dirty in Italian before he slapped both hands to his legs. He had absolutely no ideas and looking at Altair and his miserable insecurities sapped whatever brilliance he might otherwise have been capable of coming up with. All he felt was tired, with a surprising amount of sympathy. “So if talking doesn’t work for you--show him somehow?”

“I have tried,” Altair said.

Because he had, what with always inviting Malik places, remaining physically close to him at all times, threatening anyone that came near him and (from what Ezio had heard from Malik) spooning him at every opportunity. “Ok, well clearly Malik is a bigger idiot than I thought. So--try making him jealous. You know, do that thing where you flirt with someone else in front of him until he cracks and declares you belong to him and carries you off into the sunset. I mean, he’s stupid but he clearly loves you so it’ll work.”

Altair didn’t even bother dignifying the suggestion that he ‘flirt with someone’ with the inevitable veto. He just glared at him again and tightened his arms around the wad of blankets. After a moment he was just staring at the floor, looking lost and lonely and puppy-ish. 

“I’m sorry,” Ezio said softly. If only because he’d been in that place once or twice, where you were trapped and there was no way out. He’d had his heart broken before and knew there was no worse feeling in the world. “He’ll come around.”

“Do you fight?” Altair asked. He was still hugging the blankets to his chest when he asked (but funny how that didn’t make him look any less intimidating). “You seem like you would.”

“I have.” In high school, with idiots that he hated. With his brother, (and sister when necessary) and now and again, family get-togethers dissolved into sparring matches for shits-and-giggles. “I don’t think I’d stand a chance against you. I fight for fun, you fight to win.”

“Malik told me once that I should learn to pull my punches.” Altair threw the blankets back at him and stood up to leave. He hesitated at the doorway, almost as if he was going to turn back and say something else and then shook it off and disappeared.

\--

Ezio went on with his life as normal (as normal as it could be) while his roommate-and-roommate’s future life partner re-enacted every soap opera ever written all around him. He went to class, flirted with beautiful women, laid around at Leonardo’s apartment complaining about his life, tried to work on his homework and futilely threw himself whole-heartedly into sleep.

In time, with less stupidity, the whole thing might have blown over. Malik would have figured out how to catch Altair, Altair would have been easily wooed by Malik’s talent for talking in dizzying circles and the two of them would have fallen back into the stupidest friends-turned-lover story ever told. (Seriously, they were both so stupid and oblivious they were perfect for one another.) 

Except Leonardo said, “why don’t you just tell both of them that the other one is in love with them?”

And Ezio said, “it’s like trying to explain the sun to the bottom of the ocean. One of them just needs to do something—preferably soon. I need to sleep again without worrying one of them is going to be there, staring at me, telling me how the other one doesn’t understand.”

Ezio’s Mother had told him (so many times now) that you should never ask for something you did not want. She may or may not have meant material items but Ezio figured that he’d gone off and hinted at wanting a drastic solution and then one showed up in his dorm room.

Altair came in through the open door wearing his white-hoodie-gray-pants combination that meant nothing good at all and kicked the door shut. He took a moment to stare at Ezio and then opened-and-shut his hands before reaching up and yanking the zipper of the hoodie down. 

“Um?” Ezio said. 

“I worked it out,” Altair said to him. He shrugged the hoodie off his shoulders and threw it behind him on the desk before pulling his T-shirt off. His chest and stomach were nothing but hard-lean muscles, hardly hairy (how strange) and only just tanned. He was kicking his shoes off without a word of explanation. 

“Good for you?” Ezio said. “What did you work out?”

“I know how to make him jealous. I need you to kiss me.” He said it like it was that easy. As if his presence alone would incite Ezio to go along with that kind of madness and the impatient motion of his hands added to the presumption that this idea was actually going to work. “He’ll be here soon.”

“This is a bad idea.”

“You said I should make him jealous. I know he finds you attractive but he doesn’t want to have sex with you and he isn’t in love with you. If he gets jealous it’s because of me.”

“I can see you put a lot of thought into this,” Ezio said. He stood up because Altair looming half-naked over his bed made the hairs at the back of his neck stand on end. “But this isn’t going to do anything but hurt his feelings. It’s not the kind of thing that you do to someone you like.”

“I told him I loved him and he said that he was proud I was working on expanding my vocabulary. I asked him to prom and he said he would go so my Grandmother wouldn’t bother me about avoiding social situations.”

Oh God.

“I joined the swim team in sophomore year because he did because his physical therapist said it was a good idea. I can’t even take a bath because I’m afraid of drowning.”

“Oh my God,” Ezio said. 

“Do this for me,” Altair said. If Ezio had met this man here, flayed straight down to the red-and-bleeding bits, he would never have had the heart to be afraid of him. There was nothing terrifying or worrying about Altair on the verge of breaking down. It wasn’t violence in his face but something a lot more devastating. 

“Swear that you’re not going to break any of my fingers,” Ezio said, “no matter how this turns out. Also—I’m not gay and I think this is officially a bad idea just so those things are on the record.”

“I accept all the blame. I won’t hurt you no matter how this turns out.”

Ezio nodded and took a step toward Altair because kissing required closeness and got a hand in his face for his efforts. He was going to protest and point out a few important things about the whole process of kissing someone but Altair said, “take your shirt off,” like it should have been _obvious_. And when his shirt was off Altair cocked his head and stared at his chest. 

“I’m Italian,” he said, “we’re hairy. You and Malik are hairless freaks as far as I’m concerned.”

\--

As it turned out, kissing Altair wasn’t that different than kissing anyone else. He wasn’t as pliant and he wasn’t as skilled and he really wasn’t as interested. But he was goal-oriented and after a few initial fumbles, he relaxed in place and let Ezio take the lead, maneuvering them around so that they would be caught in the most convincing position. 

Which was how Malik found them—half naked and kissing hard.

Then the door slammed shut and Altair all but kicked him away in his haste to get out the door after Malik. Ezio followed only because it seemed relevant to see how the whole thing ended and almost regretted it when a dozen catcalls echoed through the hall he was trying to run down. 

Altair was standing just outside the door of the dorms with his hand pressed to his red face and his shoulders slumped forward. “He hit me and he ran away.”

\--

The saying went: hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

But whoever made up that gem hadn’t met Malik and they sure as shit had never pissed him off. Less than a fully twenty four hours after Ezio agreed to the World’s Dumbest Plan Ever and got caught in a compromising position, Malik’s vengeance was already plastered all over half of the fucking campus. Ezio walked face first into a wall of his face slapped onto a wanted poster printed out on six different colors, each with a different crime. There were too many of them to read—too many to understand that they even said _anything_ instead of just a repeat of his face over-and-over again. 

Liar, they called him.

Slut. Back-stabber. Cheat. 

Ezio went cold-and-blank, stuttered into stillness and just stared at them. At his face—not a picture but a near-perfect line drawing of his face. (And wasn’t that just like the fucking bastard to know exactly where to hit to make it hurt the most.) There was a crowd at his back, a cluster of other people that had seen the display of many colors and came flocking to it. They were awed with gasps and giggles and one slap against his back with some platitude or another spoken in a language that Ezio suddenly couldn’t understand.

\--

“Fuck you!” was the first thing Ezio said to Leonardo when he opened his apartment door. He threw a fist full of the posters at his smile and barked a laugh when they hit Leonardo in the face and made him flinch away. There was no invitation to come in and Ezio didn’t fucking _care_ but shoved the door open and ignored the way Leonardo was rubbing his face and stepping backward out of the way. “I can understand _him_ doing some stupid fucking shit like this because if there was ever a _bitch_ drowning in hypocrisy it’d be him—but you? _You_?”

Leonardo picked up one of the papers and squinted at it in the dim light of his living room with one hand rubbing at his forehead and a distinctly green look around his neck and behind his ears. He looked hung over as all hell as he turned the paper over twice and then looked up at Ezio. “I—”

“Tell me you didn’t do this,” Ezio said, “tell me that you didn’t know what he was doing.” 

“I was drunk, Ezio. He—I was drunk and stupid and I didn’t mean for it to, why are there so many of these?” He was crouching down to pick up the sheets, flipping them around to read them and getting paler and greener at every new one he came across. 

“Because they’re everywhere!” Ezio screamed. “They’re at the school and in the dorms and they’re at the fucking McDonalds on the corner. I didn’t do anything to you to deserve this.”

Leonardo was on his knees in front of a pile of his handiwork with one hand across his mouth and something that looked an awful lot like tears in his eyes. He nodded his head like he was agreeing and didn’t say a single word in his own defense. 

“Where is he?” Ezio asked.

“I don’t know,” Leonardo said, “he left this morning—he didn’t say where he was going. Why would I ask?” He didn’t get up but looked at him from where he was and said, “I’m sorry, Ezio.”

“Whatever,” was the only small mercy he could manage.

\--

The door to his dorm was covered with the flapping posters and more of them were shoved under his door. The accusations kept on-and-on and not a single one of them was any less biting than the one before. He balled them up and shoved them into a trash bag and kicked the bag until the papers were all over the floor again. That was where Altair found him, stomping on slips of colorful paper with brilliant-white-curses exploding out between his teeth. 

“Fuck you too!” Ezio shouted at him, “the two of you deserve each other!”

Altair looked repentant and beaten. He didn’t say a word but held out a wad of the posters. There were paper cuts on his hands and dark circles under his eyes. 

\--

During the course of his life, Ezio had relied on his big brother for advice and guidance and when necessary for a shelter from the tumultuous storm of adolescence. Federico had been patient and understanding (insomuch as a brother could be) in a way that was both obnoxious and endearing. When he’d gone off and grown up long before Ezio was ready to bother with such a stupid idea, Federico had still been there to listen to his idiot nonsense.

So it was fitting when he let himself into his brother’s place and threw himself into the couch and pulled the throw folded over the back of it over his face. The whole house smelled like orange slices and something sort of spicy and it was quiet and cool and not shouting negative adjectives at him.

It must-have-been, might-have-been hours later when Federico woke up him by kicking him in the thigh and held out a beer and motioned at a coffee table full of take out. Ezio was so grateful for the wordless acceptance that he might have started bawling like a child again. (Not that he’d ever resorted to crying when there was Claudia to do that for all of them.) He took the beer and sat on the couch with the throw tucked in around his body like a cape. 

“So what genius thing has my baby brother done this time?” He didn’t look anything like a banker in his undershirt and blue jeans, slouching in an arm chair with a foam plate filled with Chinese and take-out pizza balanced on his body. 

“Why is it something I’ve done?” Ezio asked. He drank the beer—gulped it down as fast as he could manage—and then raised the empty bottle to Federico, “I’m telling Mom you gave me this.”

“Eh,” Federico said. He snapped his chopsticks and fumbled with how to hold them in his fingers for a minute before getting it approximately right. “I thought you had everything you wanted at college. Women, freedom, very little education.”

“I just needed a break,” Ezio said. 

They ate in companionable silence, talked about nothing important and then found themselves talking about the family and when they were kids and how Claudia got more annoying every year she got older. They agreed Petruccio deserved better than being stuck at home with her and resolved to be better big brothers and spring him from the hell that was being stuck with their only sister for extended periods of time. 

“Yeah but what is the thing with the feathers? I mean really?” Ezio said, “it’s weird right? Did you have a thing like that?”

Federico was laughing, all rosy and stuffed with a few empty bottles at his side. “No, it’s weird. But it could be worse. He could have been born without a brain like you.” He laughed again when Ezio glared at him and then picked himself up and came over to sit on the couch next to him. They had never been good at talking about their feelings, never really bothered with the whole distracting mess of putting things into words. Federico had figured him out years ago, though, knew everything he was feeling just by looking at him. So when he sat next to him and elbowed him in the side, Ezio felt all raw and achy. “Listen to your brother,” Federico said. “You are better than they say you are. Stupid, yes, but you are still a good person. Maybe even better than me. So fuck them. And if you’ve already fucked them, then made amends and forget them.”

Ezio stared at his own hands, thought about nothing at all. 

“I’ll beat them up,” Federico offered.

Ezio laughed and Federico looked offended. Oh-but-he hadn’t met Altair and he had no idea what kind of fucking mess Ezio’s life was devolving into. Still, Ezio patted him on the shoulder, “I can fight my own fights.” 

_I just needed a moment to hide._

\--

There were six messages from Leonardo on his phone, every one of them some kind of apology or another: one an outright apology, one to explain that the original draft had been uploaded to the internet for everyone to make their own poster (that explained how it was everywhere), one saying that Leonardo had hacked the account that uploaded it and removed it, one saying it-was-never-meant-to-happen, one saying that Leonardo would launch a campaign to mend Ezio’s damaged reputation if he wanted him to and then the last one to offer (sheepishly) the knowledge that Malik had asked to stay in Leonardo’s apartment for a few days and Leonardo had agreed to let him.

Ezio called him back and Leonardo sounded like he’d fallen off something in his haste to answer the phone, “hello?”

“I’m still pissed at you,” Ezio said. His dorm room was still littered with the stupid posters that had his face splashed all across him with a whole thesaurus full of ‘terrible-human-being’ in bold font. 

“I know,” Leonardo said quietly.

“That said, you know that if I show up at your place and beat his stupid face in, he’s going to know that you ratted him out.” There wasn’t much fair-feeling in Ezio’s gut at the moment but Leonardo was a friend that he wanted to keep through this stupid thing (current amazingly bad decision aside). 

“I weighed my options before I called you. Not that he wasn’t a good lay, but he got me drunk and used my art without credit.” Leonardo was going for light-hearted and it came across nervous-and-forced.

“You didn’t,” Ezio said. He all but slapped himself in the face and bit back the groan of fucking-stupid-bitches (because _fucking-stupid-bitches_ ). “You did not have sex with Malik.”

“We were emotionally compromised. It’s not like it meant anything.” 

“No, it’s fine. I just—I. I don’t even know. Is he there right now?” Ezio scratched the stubble on his jaw and pulled his phone away from his face to look at the time. It was early-evening, about the time the campus started crawling out of their various hiding places looking for food like a zombie apocalypse. Malik didn’t usually work on Thursdays but he had an intermittent group thing he did. 

“Yes,” Leonardo said.

“Keep him there,” Ezio said.

\--

Leonardo’s apartments were close enough to campus that they were overrun with college kids but far enough away that getting to them required driving. He was an upper-classman with a good job (and several freelance art things on the side) but he was still just a broke-ass college kid in the end. His apartment was boxish and crowded with art supplies in every possible corner (except those taken up by engineering projects that were never quite-finished). 

Ezio didn’t knock because he assumed the door would be unlocked, and Malik (asshole that he was) looked up at him from the paint-splattered couch without having the good grace to look surprised. He was wearing the same clothes he’d left the dorm in _days_ ago with enough stubble on his face to look like a damn beard and his hair in chaotic peaks that defied even his normal bedhead’s lax adherence to gravity. 

Leonardo looked repentant and anxious, standing at the doorway to the kitchen with a paintbrush in one hand and a sandwich in the other. He was dressed in his freelance artist clothes with smudges of oil paint on his jaw and wrists and a pencil stain on his hand. “I—uh,” he said.

Malik set the book he’d been reading to the side and stood up because no one had ever told him that you shouldn’t provoke a bad situation. He dusted his dirty clothes off and set his feet in a way that was vaguely reminiscent of Altair before spreading his arms. He was _asking for it_ with a miserable darkness around his eyes and a haggard dumbness of his mouth.

It hadn’t even been his intention to punch him. In fact, Ezio had promised himself that he was going to try to use his words to explain how he felt first and then resort to violence after (regardless of what he told Leonardo). Just, it was Malik’s fucking face and the way he stared at him like daring him to do it. The presumption of Ezio’s vengeance, the ultimate worthlessness of it, that made him punch the stupid fucker right in his stupid face. Malik jerked hard to one side but didn’t fall, let his body react to the impact and then right himself and came up in a defensive posture. 

His face was going to bruise but there was no blood (yet), just the darkness of his glare. 

“You asshole!” Ezio shouted at him, “You absolute asshole! I told you to go talk to him, I told you just to tell him how you felt. I told you that you were being an idiot but you didn’t listen to me. No you just went right on thinking that you’re better than everyone else, like _always_! And then you had to drag me into it too!”

Malik stared at him blankly for a second, then went red with fury and then started shouting at him in a language that Ezio couldn’t understand. The words were too fast and the sounds too foreign to make out as anything but a stream of hateful bullshit. 

“Speak something I understand!” Ezio shouted.

Leonardo was closer now than he was before, close enough to whistle loud enough to hurt his ears. “Hey,” he said, “do you speak Arabic?” he asked Ezio and Ezio shook his head no. Then he looked at Malik and said, “do you speak Italian? What you don’t? I’m pretty sure that the two of you are doing a good enough job at not understanding the other without adding completely different languages!”

“I wasn’t,” Ezio started and then stopped and sneered at his own stupid brain. His mother-and-father had taught him Italian long before they’d bothered with English and now-and-again he didn’t even realize he’d lost the second language. “I said, you’re stupid and petty and ridiculous.”

“Because I was the one fucking the person you’re in love with.”

Leonardo made a small noise, like a flutter of pain before he threw the paintbrush into the pile of supplies and sat down on the arm of his couch to eat his sandwich. 

“First off, I didn’t fuck him. Secondly, it was his God-damned idea. Third, this is all your fucking fault because if you weren’t so arrogant you would have realized that he’s been in love with you since sophomore year of high school.”

“Fuck you,” Malik said. (And wasn’t that interesting, how quickly his higher level thinking shut down when he was sleep-deprived and injured.) “Why would he ask you to maul him on my bed?”

“Because I’m hot and I’m good in bed,” Ezio snapped. It wasn’t the answer that he should have given but he was permitted a bit of pettiness after the week of hell. So when Malik launched himself at him and started throwing punches, Ezio wasn’t even surprised.

“Get out!” Leonardo shouted at them. He hit them with a broom until they pulled far enough apart from one another to be two separate bodies. Ezio rolled up onto his feet and Malik grabbed his stuff off the couch and stormed out of the apartment. Leonardo pointed at the door with a grim-and-furious darkness to his face. “Go, Ezio.”

Outside, Malik had already shoved his stuff into his bag and started walking away. Ezio ran after him, (shouldn’t have, but then again, he’d never been very good at leaving well enough alone) and caught him by the back of the jacket. Malik reacted the way he always had when someone came up behind him—abrupt violence all sharp-fast-and-hot. He elbowed Ezio in the face and tried to kick him.

“What’s wrong with you?” Ezio demanded.

“You, currently.” Malik was sweating and leaning to one side, with his bag hanging off his shoulder and dragging him forward toward the ground. The angry flush of his skin did nothing to hide the agitated terror that was drawing the color away from his neck. “I trusted you,” Malik said.

“I could say the same to you,” Ezio said. And because he wasn’t innocent (but tired) he put up his hands to fend off another rolling vomit of curses. “Look, Altair is in love with you. You’re in love with him. I don’t give a fuck what you do about it but if you could just stop fucking _my life_ up.”

“Oh yeah, he looked like he was really in love with me when he was tongue-fucking your mouth.” Malik grimaced as he rubbed his left arm and then pulled the strap of his bag straight across his body. He stood up as straight as he could before saying, “I didn’t mean for the poster thing to happen. I was drunk. Most of them weren’t even mine.”

“That doesn’t make it better.”

“The only thing I did on purpose was fuck Leonardo because he’s in love with you,” Malik said. He said it just like that, as if it meant nothing at all to him. (Of course it didn’t. All was fair in love and war.) “I figured he’d sell me out.”

“Well I’m actually a nice guy.” Ezio shook his head, trying to work through all the reasons he wanted to break Malik’s face in. The anger wasn’t hot like it had been but a painful feeling kind of thing. “Seriously, Malik. For the love of God, Altair is afraid of water and he took swimming to be around you. He asked me to kiss him because he figured you’d be jealous enough to actually do something. Pretty sure he didn’t figure you’d do all this bullshit.”

Malik looked embarrassed (at last), verging almost onto ashamed by the whole disaster. “You don’t know who you are until your roommate is trying to fuck the man you’re in love with.” 

“Surprise, you’re an ass.” Ezio was just _tired_. He wanted nothing more than to climb into his car and go find his bed and sleep until the whole thing was over-and-dealt with. “You want a ride back to the dorm?”

For once (for the first time ever), Malik looked uncertain. “How is he?”

“He punched a mirror, he hasn’t slept in days. He’s kind of like you but silent and much less a pain in my ass. Now, do you want a ride?” He motioned back toward his car and waited for Malik to decide whether or not he could (in good conscience) accept a ride from him. In the end he nodded his head and hobbled after him toward the car.

\-- 

The most surprising thing about co-inhabiting a small space with Malik was that even after everything, it was simple familiarity. The pile of ripped up and stomped on posters aside, there was nothing different about their dorm room or the way the two of them fit into it. Malik still took too long in the shower, it still annoyed him. Malik still had to make sure all of his stuff was put away right before he’d turn off the light and go to bed and it still _annoyed him_. When the lights were off and Malik was fiddling with his blankets for half-a-damn-hour it _still annoyed him_. 

“For the love of God, go to sleep.” 

Malik didn’t bother with a comeback but went still and silent (at last). 

In the morning, he still woke up too early and even in his shuffling attempts at quiet woke Ezio up long before he was ready. Normally he rolled over with his blanket pulled up to his eyeballs and stubbornly ignored the world at large until Malik left to go to class or a club meeting or the library or his job or whatever else he did. He intended do that very thing until he heard the rustle of paper and opened his eyes to see Malik-dressed-for-the-day crouching in the middle of the posters. He was flattening a few of them out and frowning at what they said. There was a livid bruise on his face, his lip was split and he rubbed at his bicep in that way that usually made Altair sneer angrily at nothing. 

“Fuck,” Malik said to the papers and balled them up again. He didn’t seem to realize he was being watched as he dropped the papers and stood up. There was a moment where he hesitated and then grabbed his work clothes off the chair where he’d folded them and pulled open the door to leave.

\--

It was another three hours (give or take) before Ezio woke up for real. He sat up on the edge of his bed and rubbed his neck where an ache had formed overnight. His face was sore but after looking in the mirror (several times) there weren’t any bruises, just a lingering pinkness near his jaw. He took a shower to work out yesterday’s kinks and decided that shaving his already sore face would be stupid.

When he left the bathroom, Altair was there shoving the crumpled posters off the floor into an already overflowing black trash bag. He was wearing his coffee-shop green shirt with his apron thrown over his shoulder. The uniform was the only thing in the world that made him look like a stupid college kid instead of something more deadly. “I think I’ve got them all now,” Altair said. He stood up and couldn’t manage to catch himself before he looked shocked; it was just a brief flash of dumbness before it was gone and his usual mask of nothingness covered it. “What happened to your face?”

“You should see the other guy,” Ezio said. 

Altair shifted on his feet, let go of the bag of crumpled posters and took a long moment to think over what he thought about that. Malik’s bed had the conspicuous look of having been slept in (or maybe it was just because Ezio knew that he’d been there that it seemed like a glaringly obvious sign). It wouldn’t have mattered if it had been brand new because Altair probably had the smell of Malik’s lingering presence memorized like some kind of tracking dog. 

“Before you launch into your usual violence, I want to say that the little bastard deserved it. More to the point, I didn’t hurt him as much as I could have.” There was more he could have said in his own defense: perhaps the fact that even though Malik said he didn’t intend for the whole poster thing to happen, he still hadn’t apologized for it or perhaps how Malik had purposefully gone to his friend and fucked him because he thought it would hurt his feelings. 

But really, who knew Malik better than Altair?

“I’m sorry,” is what Altair said. Then he stood there awkwardly for a moment and nodded toward the door. “I’ve got to get to work.” But he didn’t move (yet), just stood there looking uncertain and conflicted. “What if I’m still mad at him when I see him?”

“Oh my God,” Ezio said, “well don’t fight with him until _after_ the two of you are finished with your shift. That’s all the advice I’ve got to offer.” He clapped Altair on the arm. “Don’t come back and hit me later.”


	3. Chapter 3

Malik had never been a coward even when he hadn’t been brave. His mother liked to tell him that he was foolishly headstrong and his father tended to call it determination. Altair had been the first to tell him that he was stupidly arrogant, too caught up in being _right_ to be worried about being _safe_. That had been years ago when the long surgical scars on his arms were still bright red wheals.

Still, his heart was beating through his chest in the too-small break room where he hung the clothes he’d worn to class in his locker and ran his hand nervously through the mess of his hair. (Ezio told him he rocked the bedhead look, Altair told him he didn’t look right with shorter hair and his mother frowned at him and muttered about cowlicks and hair gel before she attacked him with combs.) His face still hurt and his split lip burned when he licked it (and he couldn’t seem to stop) but his stomach was doing somersaults and his pulse was conducting a marching band and he felt dizzy. 

The door opened behind him and Malik pushed the locker he had been staring into shut and turned around. 

Altair was standing there—whisper-thin and tall and _real_ again—with his hands in his pockets and his apron over his shoulder. He was exactly the same as he’d been the last time Malik had seen him, no different than the boy he’d always been. Just as stoic and blank, just as unsure and aloof. The only difference was the darkness around his eyes and the tired slump of his shoulders. “He wasn’t kidding,” Altair said. He nodded toward Malik’s face.

“Well, I think I earned it,” Malik said. 

“I think you did.”

Malik had taken public speaking, and debate, he’d been in Honor Society, Model UN, he graduated Valedictorian and given a speech in front of his entire graduating class and every member of their families that could be packed into one auditorium. He had stood in front of a thousand strange eyes and felt nothing at all like the paralyzing fear he felt as he looked at Altair in the break room of the coffee shop. (He wondered for a moment, if this was what Altair felt like every time he opened his mouth to talk.) He just couldn’t make himself say a damn thing, couldn’t bring his tongue and throat and lips to work. 

“I shouldn’t have kissed Ezio. I was mad and I thought if I kissed him that you would stop looking at me like I was some _thing_ instead of some _one_.” His hands were still in his pockets and he sighed at the end then looked at the clock at the end of the room. “We’re going to be late.”

Malik looked at the clock and nodded dumbly. He followed Altair out because he couldn’t think of a single thing to say and he stood at the register and found enough of his voice to take orders and give out change and up-sell but it felt distant and far away.

\--

The truth was, Malik was a vicious, rabid, vengeful little creature possessed of the deepest and worst sort of jealousy masked by a sense of righteousness. He’d discovered his own jealousy as a child, seething in unimaginable rage at the things he wanted-and-didn’t have. Always the intellectual, he had started small in kindergarten trading petty jealousy over Lunchables and snack-sized candy bars for slightly higher ground of healthy teeth and a strong body. It had grown every year until he was trading his jealousy over action figures for a deep-set desire to educate himself with thick-and-dusty books. 

Altair had been an easy target. The boy he’d been had been every bit as talented as the man he was now. Altair had been able to draw and then run and then climb and then anything that relied on physical strength and agility. He had been able to read before Malik, and he’d tossed away his perfect papers as if they were worthless and he’d spent all of his time doodling in the corners of his papers and staring outside when he should have been paying attention. Malik’s jealousy over the effortlessness of Altair’s achievements had been easily funneled into his hatred of the man’s callous indifference to people. 

When Altair said that he would win, he did. When Altair said he did not need to study, he did not. But it was the lack of humility about his gifts that Malik concentrated his hatred on as he worked to be humble-while-excelling. 

Oh-and-Malik had made it years-and-years of his life pretending that he had a moral high ground, trading his jealousy for righteous outrage. Sooner-or-later he forgot that he was _pretending_ to be better than everyone and started believing he just was better.

That was before he bought a six pack and invited himself over to Leonardo’s apartment. Before he told the man all about how Ezio had betrayed him, how he was back at the dorm making out with the man that Malik was in love with. Before he watched Leonardo break down in pieces, emptying bottles while he worked through his own disappointment. Before Malik mumbled, ‘fuck them’ like they were in some secret club where they’d both been hurt and Leonardo let him kiss him because he was wounded-and-raw. 

\--

Altair disappeared during his break. Malik sat in the break room with a dry sandwich and a bottle of water that he didn’t eat or drink. They finished out the day playing at being perfectly normal while auto-pilot Malik dodged questions about his face and sold cookies like heroin. 

They were clumsy and silent as they gathered their stuff and left the coffee shop. Altair nodded and waved to the people that called good bye and Malik stared at his shoes until they were outside in the late-afternoon sunshine. They walked the direction they always walked, with Altair keeping a steady-slow pace at his side and Malik trying to work out what the hell he meant to say.

“I have a speech,” Altair said on the corner they crossed when Altair didn’t drive. (He often didn’t, because gas was expensive and because he’d rather walk.) “I used to practice it in my room when my Grandma was asleep. I did everything you told me to do—stood in front of the mirror, made eye contact, pretended I was in my underwear. I have delivered this speech so many times I sometimes forget that nobody else has ever heard it.”

Malik looked at him. “Yeah?”

“I lost my mother at birth. I lost my father when I was five. My only friend before you told me that I was a freak in first grade. He convinced a bunch of other boys that I was a girl and they used to throw rocks at me on the playground by my house and call me names. I asked him why, once. He told me that he was only my friend because his mother felt sorry for me and he threatened to hurt me if I ever told her we weren’t friends. Nobody else has ever been my friend. We weren’t friends for a long time, but you were always there—telling me that I was wrong and trying to be better than me.” (And failing, of course.) “I thought, here is someone that understands how miserable it is to be lonely when you are surrounded by people. You were always so angry, Malik. You were always alone. I just wanted to find a way to tell you that I understood. But you scared the hell out of me—I’m stronger and faster but you could bury me in words. So when Robert De Sable and his friends hurt you, I finally had a way to get through to you. You let me help you and I thought that if I could just be useful to you that you’d see me, you see that I wasn’t this enemy. We’re friends, we’ve been friends for a long time. I’ve seen every side of you, at your best and your worst—and I love you. I love you so much that I can’t stand it, that I’d do anything for you.” Altair looked exhausted with the effort of talking and paused, looked at his feet for a breath and up again, “I don’t know why you don’t see that.”

Malik felt flushed and hurt and embarrassed. There was a heavy dampness on his eyelashes and a worthless frog in his throat. He swallowed against it and blinked until he felt a gritty dampness on his cheek and scrubbed it away. The whole disaster of the last two weeks was overwhelming. “You know what kind of terrible person I am?” Malik said.

“Yes,” Altair said, “I’ve spent a few days tearing down the evidence.”

Oh-that-wasn’t-funny. Malik didn’t laugh but bark some nervous coughing-chuckle and rubbed his face with his hand.

“I’m not better. I challenge you to things I know you’ll lose.”

“That’s slightly different than fucking someone’s friend out of spite,” Malik said. He heaved a sigh and shook his head—at himself, at Altair, at everything.

“What?” Altair asked.

Since they were here, since they’d been taking up space on this corner for far-too-long and there was nothing else to lose. (Since it would come out eventually, like it always did.) “That night, I went over to Leonardo’s and got drunk with him and had sex with him. He’s in love with Ezio. It seemed fair.”

Altair went blank, all empty space behind his eyes and in the tight grip of his fists. When he came back (just seconds later) he said, “you earned far more than you got,” he said with a vague motion at the bruise on his face.

“I’m sorry I lied to you. I’m sorry I made you feel like a thing,” Malik said. “I knew you loved me but I didn’t think it was—I just didn’t think.” 

“Are you two going to go?” was a polite interjection from the side. The lady pointed at the crosswalk sign blinking go and when they didn’t immediately react worked her way around them to cross the street.

“I kissed Ezio to make you mad. I thought you’d yell at me and I would give you the speech and everything would work out. Then you ran away, and the posters…” Altair moved a step closer, one of his hands reaching out to catch Malik’s waist (in a way that was distinctly, noticeably Ezio-like). “You love me.” It wasn’t a question and therefore, not something that could be doubted or refuted. His mouth was a wide smile, his full lips opening just enough to see the white of his teeth. “You idiot.”

Malik wasn’t _much_ shorter than Altair but just a matter of inches that hardly mattered any other time. He shifted on his feet so he could tip his head back and put his right hand on Altair’s chest. “I think if either one of us is the idiot here, it’s you for still being in love with me.”

Altair looked stupid with a smile on his face. His Grandmother’s reassurances of the attractive qualities of a smile aside, the man just wasn’t made to grin. But it was an endearing stupid when it was all his. “I want to kiss you.”

“I’m kind of waiting for it,” Malik said.

Altair pulled away and grabbed his right hand to drag him into the street. They’d stood at the corner so long they’d missed the crosswalk light but Altair had always preferred dodging cars. “Once I start kissing you I don’t want to stop,” he said when they were on the safety of the sidewalk again. 

“So we’re going to your room?” Malik said. He had to walk-faster to keep up instead of being dragged. The faster he moved to keep time the faster Altair walked until they were jogging through the town toward the campus with people-and-cars staring-and-honking at them.

 

\--

Malik was never going to learn (not ever) to stop trying to keep up with Altair. It had become a habit in the long-ago days of childhood when being better than someone seemed infinitely more important than being good at being himself. He’d learned the same lesson time and time again and still found himself surprised when he collapsed out of a steady jog into a winded walk that lagged six-seven-ten-fifteen steps behind Altair. 

“No, you go on,” he called.

Altair stopped and turned around—all glistening with sweat, shirt sticking to his chest and the much-too-well-defined muscles of his back—and put his hands on his hips. “There’s less than a mile left.” He said it like it was just simply unbelievable that Malik was walking _now_. They were _minutes_ (worth of running more) away from the dorm. For just a second that arrogant sneer of his lip made Malik think about hitting him before it slipped away and he waited patiently for Malik to catch up to him. He wasn’t wearing a hoodie so there was nowhere for his hands to go, and in absence of somewhere to hide his fists, his arms looked odd hanging at his sides. “You should come running with me more often.”

“Why go running when I can sit on your bed and watch you do push-ups?” Malik said. 

Altair stuck his tongue out at him. “When we were younger I always wondered why you stared at me so much.”

“When we were younger I used to wonder what you looked like naked,” Malik said. His chest wasn’t aching so much (too out of practice, not even an old man) but his legs still felt warm and over-worked. There was sweat in puddles inside of his shirt that was turning uncomfortably cool now that he wasn’t moving as fast. “And then we joined the swim team.” (And you’re apparently terrified of water.)

“Hey,” Altair said. He caught his right arm in a loose tug of fingers and pulled him back a step. They fell into one another under the still-naked branches of a tree. Altair’s other hand was hovering at his waist with a hesitant twitch. Malik wrapped one arm around his back and set the other one against Altair’s chest over the too-hard-too-rapid beat of his heart. 

“Hey,” Malik said back. 

Altair leaned in close enough his breath was a taste on Malik’s lips, close enough his nose was brushing against Malik’s and each-and-every one of his eyelashes were in easy focus as his eyes got heavy-and-half-closed. “If you don’t start running, I’m going to lock you out of the room.”

“You fucker,” Malik said as he grabbed him by the elbow and let his body be pulled into a run as Altair took off.

\--

They crashed, did not fall or even stumble, into Altair’s dorm room. The often-missing roommate had decided to show up in their absence (maybe that was a thing he did, who even knew). He stared at them like a deer staring straight into headlights, one hand toweling his hair dry and the other holding his phone with his thumb poised over the on-screen keyboard. 

“Oh,” he said, “hi.”

Altair didn’t growl but the way his face went from amused-almost-cheerful to aggressively-unhappy might as well made an audible sound. His shirt was soaked so tight to his skin the flinch of muscle tightening all over was instantly obvious, in the same way his body shifting to separate Malik from the intruder (who lived there) wasn’t subtle at all. 

“Hello Desmond,” Malik said. He was heaving for breath, not laughing anymore—still fading away from giddy. Altair’s half of the room was a polite mess—stacks of books and boxes and things that started at the floor and reached halfway up the wall. His clothes were kicked under the end of the bed and his blankets were balled up by his pillow (because he didn’t need heat to sleep but something to hang on to). Malik fell back onto the bed and kicked his shoes off because his feet were throbbing. His skin felt wet-and-sweat-tacky and he thought maybe he shouldn’t roll around on Altair’s bed because he was wet and smelly. (And then thought, fuck it because he was comfortable.) 

“Hi,” Desmond said. “I was leaving.” He didn’t say it to Malik but Altair who had only relaxed slightly, and hadn’t moved at all. 

“You don’t have to,” Malik said, because there was no way that Desmond wasn’t going to run for his life as soon as he was fully dressed and able. He rolled onto his side and grabbed the top book off the stack closest to the bed. It was dog-eared and faded yellow, worn through in so many places that it was barely readable. The front cover had been ripped off a dozen years ago and the spine was held together by masking-and-packing-tape. 

Altair put his hands in his pockets. It was something his grandmother always told him to do when he got aggravated. _Put your hands in your pockets dear. Every time you start to feel angry, put your hands in your pockets._

Malik was better at pretending but neither of them were very good at not looking impatient while Desmond packed up his stuff and waved good bye at them as he left. He didn’t run away but that could have been just as much the evolutionary imperative not to run from predators as an attempt to look unthreatened.

The door slammed when Altair kicked it. “Of course he has to be here today. He is never here except when he’s not wanted.”

“Well, I’m sure he’s never wanted.” Malik felt lazy and warm in Altair’s bed. It smelled like him all shampoo and soap and the distinct scent of his skin. The sheets were flannel-stripes, the very same that Altair’s grandma she’d been buying him since the dawn of time. They were worn in and butter-soft. 

Altair undid the top three buttons of his work shirt and pulled it over his head and threw it on the floor. “I don’t care if he is here most of the time. I just do not want him here when I am.” He kicked his shoes off before he put his knee on the edge of the bed. He was impossibly-tall when Malik was flat on his back looking up at him. His pants were low on his waist, his belly was perfectly flat save the rise-and-fall of muscle. His belly button was a slight dip and just below it the trail of little brown hairs that disappeared under his waistband. “I think I’m still mad at you,” Altair said. 

There was no anger in the way he crawled up onto the bed, or in the way he put one leg across Malik’s and sat back against his thighs. He didn’t look angry as he pulled the green shirt out from where it had been tucked it and started undoing the buttons from the bottom up. 

“I’m mad at you a lot,” Malik said. He had one hand under the pillow he was laying and the other idly pressed against Altair’s bent knee. “Is it an important kind of mad?”

Altair made it all the way to the button at his throat and pushed the shirt off his shoulders and tugged it off his wrists while Malik arched his back enough to let the shirt be pulled away and thrown over Altair’s head. “How long have you wanted to have sex with me?” Altair asked.

Malik’s breath caught in his throat and his cheeks felt all rosy-with-heat. Altair’s hands were pressed against the bed on either side of his chest and he was leaning forward close enough to make the whole rest of the world seem unimportant and distant. “A while. Since I figured out I liked guys, since you beat up those meatheads for me.”

“Wait longer,” Altair said. “I don’t want to be mad at you the first time.” 

There was a flash-bomb of protests that exploded somewhere between his dick and his brain that sputtered out and died across his tongue when he opened his mouth to voice them. Altair was just looking at his face, braced for the inevitable verbal lashing he was going to get in return. It wasn’t like Malik would berate him into having sex but he didn’t have to take being led here and denied with any kind of grace either. 

“Yeah,” he said. Malik pulled Altair closer, because he missed him, because he’d forgotten the way his body felt against his, the way his arm curled around his chest. “I’m fucking tired anyway.” 

“Take a nap, we can order food when we wake up.”

\--

There was a special place in hell reserved for the special kind of underhanded assholes that went off and broke someone’s heart out of spite. It was made up of the familiar heat of Altair’s body against his back and the oh-so-sweetly-welcome weight of his arm around Malik’s chest. The daily torture was the feeling of his knees-and-thighs pressed against the back of his legs and the nervous-sleepy twitch of his fingers dragging across the bare skin of his chest. 

It was made up entirely of knowing that Altair loved him and wanted him and was (oh-so-rightfully) mad at him.

Malik stretched because staying in the close little space and soaking up more of Altair’s body heat would have had him reassessing his decision to accept the situation as it was instead of begging and pleading for a pardon. (It wouldn’t have worked anyway, Altair didn’t say much but he never-ever went back on what he did say.)

“Stop moving,” Altair mumbled when Malik rolled onto his back. He couldn’t curl his body around him the way he wanted, but rolled up against his chest and pressed his scratchy cheek against his chest. His leg went across Malik’s thighs and he settled into place again without waking up. 

It was still hell, having all of Altair’s body that close to him, being able to draw in the sweat-over-coffee-over-shampoo smell of his hair. It was a different hell though, so the effort wasn’t completely wasted. 

\--

Malik woke up again sometime after midnight with a headache and an elbow dug into the soft meat of his stomach just below where his ribs ended. Altair was bodily shoving himself off the bed with a graceless stumble and a snorting grumble about the dark. The clock on his (most unused) desk was staring at him through the dark and Malik thought serious about pulling the blankets up and rolling over to go back to sleep. It had been days-and-days since he slept for so long and his body had no qualms with sleeping for another seven hours. 

Altair padded back into the room with the full-shocking brilliance of the bathroom light at his back. His short hair was all sticking up at the top left of his head and there were lines all down his face and chest from where he’d slept against Malik’s body. He had a toothbrush stuck in his mouth and a distinct lack of pants. “I’m hungry.” Of course he was, his body burned calories like some kind of rodent on a spinning wheel.

“It’s midnight,” Malik said. 

“The good diner is still open.” Altair dug a pair of pants out from under his bed, and plopped his nearly naked ass down on the bed next to Malik to stick his legs into them. “Get up.”

“I hate everything about you,” Malik mumbled. But he got up and used his spare toothbrush to get the taste of sleep out of his mouth. He had his not-work clothes in his bag to put on but he had to take one of Altair’s (non-white) hoodies because he hadn’t thought he’d need a jacket.

\--

Altair was three-fourths the way through the world’s largest plate of fries (no joke, the waitress that brought them had been in love with Altair’s frown since the moment she set eyes on it and she always brought him an excessive amount of fries) when he said, “so, did it make you feel better?”

Malik was working on the crossword he’d found in the discarded newspaper with the crayon the waitress had given him (with a smile on her face, of course). (Malik didn’t like her either.) “Sleep did. But you ruined it with your stomach.” His own plate of food had been of an expected size and moderate temperature and was therefore already cleared. 

“Having sex with Leonardo.”

Maybe the special corner of hell he was going to had nothing but socially awkward Altairs in it, all of them looking at him with the same innocent face while stuffing French fries into their mouths. “Before I answer that, I just need to know if this is going to be a thing you bring up all the time like that time I died your hoodie purple.”

“April Fool’s jokes are stupid and you will never make me believe otherwise.” Altair hadn’t forgiven him for months after that, brought it up whenever anything aggravated him (tests, weather, his Grandmother, his own cracking voice, anything at all). “I want to understand why you did it. When I saw you dancing with those women after you lied to me about needing to study I was mad. But I didn’t want to hurt anyone but you.”

“No it didn’t make me feel any better. Nothing I did made me feel better. It’s not like I rationally said, well I’m hurt and disappointed by how this turned out so I think that the only fair thing to do is to have sex with Leonardo. All I knew was that Ezio had spent what felt like years of my life telling me I should tell you I was in love with you and there he was crawling all over you. I wanted him to feel hurt and betrayed. The easiest way to do that was to hurt and betray him. But it didn’t make me feel better.”

Altair was still eating his stupid fries, nibble them from one end to his fingertips before he got another and repeated the whole process. His silence wasn’t any kind of comforting. It wasn’t the usual kind of nothing but a pointed kind of purposeful silence. 

“What are you mad at me about? Or, the most mad?” Malik asked.

“You lied to me.” Altair dropped the fry he was holding and dusted his fingers off on a napkin before he balled it up and dropped it on the plate. “Ezio isn’t in love with Leonardo. You said you had sex with him because Leonardo loved Ezio. How does that hurt Ezio?”

“I don’t know. It just seemed like it would. Ezio seems like the kind of guy that would do anything for his friends. The fact that he’s not in love with Leonardo isn’t that important. He’d be hurt because Leonardo was hurt.” (Maybe hell was having to explain his every ridiculous mistake in minute detail until he felt hot-and-defensive-and-raw.) 

Altair stared at him for a moment, eyes going narrow and hand distractedly picking at the napkin on the plate. Malik dropped the crossword and leaned back against the booth because there was no point in even pretending to work on it now. He was working through not jumping to his own defense (meager as it was) because it wouldn’t have done much-at-all to help. 

“Why didn’t you want to hurt me?” Altair asked. 

“Because I love you.” 

“You don’t make very much sense sometimes, Malik.” Altair pushed his plate to the edge of the table and pulled the crossword across the table to look down at it (upside down) and picked up the crayon like he was going to work on it. “When you make me angry I like to challenge you to things I know you’ll lose because I know you hate losing. I know that it’s petty and stupid and I always try not to do it. Then you make me mad.”

This was not a shocking revelation, really. The premeditation part of it was news to him, but the knee-jerk way Altair always found him and goaded him into something wasn’t the most subtle. 

“So you understand the concept of being petty and stupid.”

“I like Ezio,” Altair said. “He treats me like a real person.” 

Malik could count on exactly two fingers how many people in Altair’s life thought he was a real-fucking-person and not some kind of strange stubborn marionette that had sprung spontaneously to life. “I know.”

“Want to go running with me?” Altair asked. He smiled until Malik kicked him under the table and laughed at him as he kicked back.

\--

They were between parking-lot and front-door when Altair caught him by the hood and pulled him back up against his body. His arm was around Malik’s body, turning him so their chests were pressed together and his other hand slid around his face with the lingering chill of the early-early morning air. 

Malik was going to open his mouth and tell Altair to stop teasing him (because there was being patient and then there was expecting saintliness when he had already proven he wasn’t capable). But Altair kissed him, just outside the glow of a flickering street lamp, just beyond arm’s distance of the car still ticking as it cooled down. His lips were warm and sure pressed against his and his hand against Malik’s back pushed at him a little harder. Malik slid both of his hands up Altair’s back curled his fingers in the stupid-white-hoodie and held on as he shifted on his feet and pressed back against the kiss. He wasn’t-expecting but wasn’t protesting Altair kissing him again, or a third time with a hesitant lick at his lips like he’d never-ever actually kissed someone with his tongue before. 

And-oh-God, what-if. Malik was turning pink everywhere because (Holy fuck, Altair was a virgin) he was suddenly so turned on his head was buzzing and suddenly too damn scared to think. His body went on without him, body pressed easily-and-hungrily back against Altair’s and mouth opening because he hadn’t ever wanted anything as bad as he’d wanted to figure out what Altair tasted like and how he felt pressed against him every-fucking-where-possible.

“I hate mayonnaise,” Altair mumbled when he pulled back far enough to lick his own lips. There was a flinch between his eyes with a brilliant red flush all along his cheekbones. 

“You need to investigate the romance section of the library,” Malik said back. He knocked his fists against Altair’s shoulders to drag him into another kiss (he just wasn’t done yet). All the clichés of horny teenagers were nothing to the way Altair’s body felt against his, the way his hands were gripping at Malik’s arm and his waist in a frustrated battle of whims-and-wills. It would have been oh-so-good (quick-and-dirty) with Altair’s feet shuffling closer to his and the two of them step-step-stepping backward until Malik’s back hit the building. He grunted and Altair stopped kissing him long enough to look around and then had both hands on Malik’s face to pull him back into the kiss. 

Malik dropped his hands down to the small of Altair’s back, just a few tempting inches away from his ass, and pulled him forward, spread his own thighs as far as he could manage without falling over. Altair slid his arm around Malik’s shoulders to pull him forward and kiss him harder, until his head was tipping back and Altair was rocking against him as he licked at his tongue. 

Oh-sweet-merciful-God. 

“Wait,” Malik said. His head was filled up to his ears with pornographic ideas, his body was raging with blind _want_. Altair was grinding up against his body in a purely mindless way and there was no-reason-at-all he should be making an objection. “We have to go inside.” (Not that important at all.)

“Yeah,” Altair said agreeably. “Ok.” He took a minute to pull away and stood there looking distinctly uncomfortable until Malik pushed away from the wall and went to the door. He had to wait for Altair to swipe his student ID to get them into the dorm building, and they waited by the elevator with all the grace of two awkwardly aroused people trying not to look like they’d rather be having sex on the floor. 

After a hellishly slow elevator ride, they were at Altair’s door. He hesitated before he unlocked the door and hovered by the door after they were inside. The way he stared at Malik did nothing to make him feel less awkward. 

“What?” Malik asked.

“Are you going to be mad at me if I don’t want to have sex?” he asked.

Malik sighed and scratched at the back of his head, considered picking up a pillow and screaming his raging frustration into it and instead just shook his head. “No.” 

Altair stared at him a moment longer to try and decide if it was the truth or not before he nodded his head and looked down his own body with an embarrassed flush on his cheeks. “I really liked kissing you. I just—I’m still mad.”

“I really liked kissing you too,” Malik said. “But we probably shouldn’t start that again if you’re set on no sex. We should just go back to sleep.” (Right, sure, that was going to be easy with Altair wrapped around him like an octopus.) “I haven’t slept in days.”

“Me either,” Altair said. 

They did awkward circles around one another as they settled down to go back to sleep and finally ended up on the skinny dorm bed together, Altair snuggled in against his side with all of his usual insistence and none of the frantic need from before. 

 

\--

Waking up was a specifically terrible kind of torture. Altair was mumbling in his half-sleep, hands under Malik’s shirt, leg between his with his body excitingly close to his amazingly hard dick. (The worst part was that it wasn’t even the first time something of the sort had happened to him. It wasn’t even the second. He’d made an art out of extracting himself from Altair’s tentacle-like grip and jerking off in the bathroom.) Normally it was just a matter of escape but that was before he had the explicit memory of Altair kissing him passionately, pressed up and moving against him. 

There was no polite way to disentangle himself when he really didn’t want to so he settled for dumping Altair into the narrow space between Malik and the wall. He grunted and rolled onto his back and glared at him. “Come back after you finish jerking off,” was what he said.

“Just when I thought I couldn’t hate you anymore,” Malik said under his breath. He took a shower (and if he jerked off it was because he was only human) and washed his hair with Altair’s shampoo and saved his face with the razor he’d bought to leave here. The bruise wasn’t as brilliantly blue-and-purple anymore but his lip looked aggravated and red, probably from being mauled repeatedly while he was kissing Altair. 

He didn’t have any clean clothes stashed in Altair’s room, so he was stuck with the unpleasant decision between the clothes he slept in and his work clothes that he’d run across town in. Altair was still in bed when he came back into the room to sniff the two shirts before he made his decision. 

“It’s Saturday, you don’t have a class. We don’t work today.” Altair said this as if the whole notion of clean clothes was so utterly pointless he couldn’t begin to understand why Malik would need them. “Come back.” He was shirtless now, with a conspicuous sex fog hanging around the bed and a completely guileless smile. 

“As much fun as lounging in bed with you often is, I still have to figure out how angry Ezio is and how much groveling is going to be required.” He decided that the shirts were both worthless and balled them up to stick into his bag. Altair had a dozen hoodies that he never wore (because they were _colors_ ) so Malik stole a black one. 

“Fine. Give me a minute to take a shower.”

\--

Ezio was (shockingly) in the room when Altair and Malik got there. He was sitting on his bed with his laptop, slouching against the wall wearing nothing but his boxers with a spread of junk food within easy reaching distance. It was his essay-writing spread, the one that usually went on for hours while he occasionally dug himself out of his hatred for the English language and formal essays long enough to shout obscenities in Italian. He barely even noticed whenever they came in, didn’t seem to care whenever Altair sat in the chair by his bed and started rifling through his game collection (as he often did) or when Malik dropped his bag and went looking for clean clothes. 

In fact, Ezio hadn’t acknowledged their presence in anyway before Malik went into the bathroom to change into fresh clothes. But when he came out again, Ezio had shoved the laptop to the side and was sitting at the edge of the bed (all but naked) arguing with Altair about which game in a series was better—7 or 8. They were citing graphics, gameplay and storylines as reasons. 

“You’re wrong,” Ezio said, “like I respect you as a person and all but you’re wrong.”

“Your respect is useless to me when I know it comes from such a poor source.” Altair was smiling, just a tug at either side of his lips but from him it was like giddiness. He reached out to shove Ezio and Ezio shoved him back. “Graphics are not more important than storyline.”

“Some people think having something nice to look at is important. Besides I liked eight’s storyline and the battle system made so much more sense. You’re just wrong. Accept you’re wrong.”

“I accept nothing.” Altair dropped the cases when he saw Malik standing there and said, “Malik is on my side.”

“Fucking surprise there,” Ezio said. He shifted away from Altair with a half-glance over his shoulder to see Malik and then put his hands against the mattress and shoved himself back into his essay wallow. “Be gone, away with you. I have to get this finished.”

Altair stood up and put his hands back into his hoodie pockets and took the few steps necessary to hover at the door impatiently. “We’re going to finish this conversation later,” Altair said. He said it like a threat and Ezio waved a hand in the air in dismissal but grinned at his laptop as he picked it up.

Malik shooed Altair out of the room with a withering glare and Altair stuck his tongue out at him before he left. Ezio looked up when the door closed and sighed when he saw him standing there, hands flat against the keyboard and smile instantly fading away.

“I’m sorry,” Malik said. 

“Yeah, well, it’s not like I was exactly innocent. I knew how you felt about him and I still let him convince me to go through with his stupid plan.” He shrugged at his own guilt, and even almost smiled at him. Ezio had never-ever been the threatening type; he was too caught up in being alive to bother being menacing. But there was something in his face, and caught in his voice when he said, “but don’t touch my friends again. If you’ve got a problem with me, you come find me and we’ll settle it.”

Malik had grown up with Altair, the sheer ominousness of his presence and the quiet violence that seemed to have perched itself on his shoulders to ward away any attempts at friendships. He was acclimatized to smoldering fury, but Ezio’s anger wasn’t quiet or slow-burning but loud-and-bright-and-hot. 

“Agreed,” is what Malik said. “And, for the record, I don’t like seven or eight. You’re both idiots. Ten is the best.” He pulled Altair’s hoodie on and scooped up his repacked bag. 

“You should remember: a wise man always sides with his boyfriend,” Ezio said. “Feel free to stay away all weekend. I’ve got this stupid essay.” He was already sinking back into his essay, frowning at the screen and reaching blindly for his bag of chips. 

\--

Outside, Altair was doing hand stands on the narrow bannister by the stairs. His hoodie had slid down to his ribs showing off the winter-paleness of his belly. There was a couple of other people at the bottom of the steps with their phones out expressing their amazement as Altair slowly worked his way across the bannister with nothing but the strength of his hands and arms.

“How’d it go?” Altair asked when he landed gracefully on his feet. He tugged his hoodie down and dusted his reddened palms on his pants. 

“I apologized, he admitted his own guilt and then he threatened me.” Malik pulled his bag over his shoulder and stuck his own hands into the hoodie pockets. “Better than I thought. I’m starving. We should go back to your house so your grandmother can make us casserole.” (Malik hated casserole, there was no exceptions for Grandma’s casserole.)

“That’s like a three hour drive,” Altair said, “and you don’t even like it. And if your family finds out you were in town and didn’t stop to say hello to them, they will never forgive me.”

“It’s a four hour drive when you drive the speed limit, I love everything your grandmother makes on principle and if we stay overnight I’ll have time to go over and talk to them for a minute before we have to leave to come back. Problems all solved.”

Altair stared at him for a long minute, like he was working out a particularly difficult math problem and then he nodded his head. “As long as I don’t have to try to talk to your parents.”

“Well no, we’ve established that you shouldn’t do that.” They set off toward Altair’s dorm room to get his clothes and car. 

\--

Driving with Altair was like meditation. There were no parents to lecture him, no school to worry him, no brother to bother him, no responsibilities to exhaust him. There was nothing at all but the stretch of interstate they were on, the close and comfortable silence of Altair driving and the drone of the radio playing non-specific alternative rock.

\--

“Boys!” was Altair’s grandmother at the door and her arms pulling Malik into a hug while Altair stood just out of distance with both of his hands in his pockets. Grandma (she refused to be called by anything else, of course) hugged him fiercely, and kissed his cheek when she let him go. When she hugged Altair it was always light and brief before she was pulling him along next to her and telling him about how she’d hosted Poker Thursdays so don’t mind the cigar smoke smell but there were plenty of lemon bars left. 

“You should have told me you were coming,” Grandma said when they were all in her kitchen. She all but shoved them into chairs before she gave them milk and cookies. “I would have put something in the slow cooker for supper. I agreed to go over to Maude’s tonight because her husband’s gone out of town for business again. She insists that he’s cheating on her but have you seen her lately? A man would be insane to cheat on her. She’s sixty five but she looks forty. I told her I’d come over and keep her company so she doesn’t drive herself mad thinking about nonsense.”

“It’s alright,” Altair said, “we didn’t call.”

“No you didn’t. But, of course you’re welcome to anything in the fridge. I don’t have very long before I said I’d be over there. Tell me all about college.” She pulled out a chair and sat down, looking at them with her rapt attention like she’d never seen anything so fascinating. 

Altair discovered how delicious the cookies were and Malik smiled at Grandma with his most believable attempt at charming before he dug up some random anecdotes that didn’t involve recent stupidity.

\--

Altair’s bedroom had never-ever been a child’s bedroom. He had toys because his Grandmother insisted but they were kept in bins underneath his bed. Not a one of them had seen the light of day since the moment they’d been peeled out of their boxes and dropped into the bins. There were a few that sat out on the shelves just to look as if they were played with, but mostly there were shelves full of and stacks of books. No posters, no toys, no funny bed sheets. Altair’s room looked like an old man’s room. 

He had a queen sized bed with a dozen pillows though, and those worn-in flannel sheets and old fleece blankets. Malik dropped his bag on the floor by the door and collapsed into the dreamy-warmth-and-softness of Altair’s bed. “I forgot how much I love your bed,” he said.

“I knew you only loved me for my things,” Altair said. He sat on the edge of his desk with his feet against his chair and put his elbows on his knees. “I don’t understand why we’re here.”

“It’s a well-documented fact that in times of crisis, people are often motivated to return home.” Malik rolled onto his back and grabbed the edges of the sheet to drag forward over his head and shoulders as he sat up. “Everyone at my house would tell me that it’s my fault. Except my father because all he would hear is that I’m still gay and he’d refuse to talk to me. Kadar would probably be impressed that I managed to be even meaner to someone else than I’ve ever been to him. I just—” 

Altair was moving, stepping from the chair to the end of the bed and dropping to his knees in front of Malik. His head tipped to the side and his hand touched his face with the most hesitant-and-gentle brush of fingertips. He said, “you called this your home,” before he kissed him. 

Malik wrapped both of his arms around Altair and leaned back, laid them both out flat with Altair’s elbows denting the bed on either side of his body. It was every-single-one-of-his-high school day dreams in the flesh with the steady weight of Altair’s body pushing him down in the soft-warmth of Altair’s bed. 

“I don’t know what to do,” with his hands under Malik’s shirt and his mouth turning abused-pink from kissing. He licked at the wetness at the corner of his mouth with an impatient shift of his hips pushing forward against Malik’s body. “How do you…?”

Malik kissed him again, wiggled to get both of his legs free and wrapped them around Altair’s waist to pull his hips in to rock up against. His hands were under Altair’s shirt, pushing it up to the muggy space under his arms. “Take this off,” he said in between kisses and took his own off when Altair lifted away to do what he was asked. Malik kissed Altair’s throat and the prominent rise of his collarbone, put his hands on his ribs to feel the way his muscles moved as he gripped uselessly at the back of Malik’s head. 

“I used to think of you here,” Altair said softly. His voice was a groan when Malik caught his nipple between his teeth and brushed his tongue across it. “I tried to imagine what you’d look like, how you’d feel, what you’d do.”

“We’re so fucking stupid,” Malik said as he worked his way back up Altair’s mouth. He ran his tongue up his throat and pressed their mouths together, moaned into the kiss when Altair ground his hips forward in an impatient-tight-circle. “Are you sure?” Malik asked.

“Yes,” Altair said.

Malik dropped his legs back to the bed and only just managed to tell Altair to get his pants off before he was working at his own. They were idiots kicking their pants off and tossing them to the side, and rolling back together on their sides. Altair’s leg went across his and hooked behind his thighs to drag their bodies as close as he could manage. His hand was on Malik’s waist as they kissed again. The whole naked length of his body was hot-as-fire and blushing-pink. They were lazy for a moment, content to run fingertips across bare skin and soak in the strange newness of the feeling. Altair’s hands did circles everywhere above his waist. 

“You’re so ridiculous,” Malik said, “you can’t even be real.” He was kissing Altair’s throat again, sucking spots into it as he pushed him flat on the bed and moved between his thighs. He felt all hot-and-tight and air-headed with two hands on Altair’s hips holding him in place as he rocked his hips and rubbed their dicks together.

“You’re ridiculous,” Altair mumbled. He tipped his head back, body arching up against his and breath all hot-and-tight. “That feels good.” 

Malik kissed him again, curled his hand around Altair’s dick and squeezed it lightly, pressed his grinning face against the man’s sweaty neck when Altair jerked so hard he nearly knocked them both off the side of the bed. His hands grabbed Malik by the ass (finally) and dragged him forward to thrust up into his hand and against his belly. “You’re perfect,” Malik said as he worked his way down Altair’s body. 

“What are you?” Altair mumbled, up on his elbows with wide-wide eyes. His question dissolved into a groan when Malik stopped to breath hot-breath against his dick and he collapsed against the bed as soon as Malik got his mouth on him, reduced to nothing but a writhing mess of insistent moans and fumbling fingers.


	4. Chapter 4

Life continued on, as Ezio’s mother used to assure him it would. (Mother was especially good in a crisis, often known to take little boys with skinned knees away to the bathroom to wash their wounds with bitter efficiency before she kissed their hot cheeks and told them the worst had passed.) The business of living hadn’t changed at all in light of the brief-but-effective assault on his character. 

There was a great deal more, “are you that guy from the posters?” than there ever had been before. 

But there was still the predictable things: essays to write, books to read, jobs to pretend to apply for and sleep that he never seemed to have the time to have. Now and again there were even classes to attend.

\--

Cristina, the most beautiful girl in the whole damn world, finally took the time to notice that Ezio existed in a space parallel to her in freshman English Comp. His burning hatred for the English language and its ridiculousness was only matched by his admiration for and belly-deep desire to know Cristina better. Half of his time in the class had been spent staring at her listening to the teacher intently with brief breaks to answer a text she’d received or to scribble something in her notebook. He’d memorized the exact colors of her, and the way her hair moved when she laughed quietly at her phone. 

All that, and he still hadn’t found a reason to shuffle to her and introduce himself. (Maybe that was how Altair felt about everything, full of so much wanting with no way to make his mouth agree with his brain.) 

Cristina found him, though, sitting outside on a bench waiting the awkward length of time between his two Monday classes. He’d had all the best intentions about pulling out his books and putting the spare time to good use but the sun was so beautiful in the sky and the people that moved to-and-fro were so much more interesting. He’d fallen into a daydream about beautiful things and didn’t even notice Cristina until she was standing right in front of him with a pile of books balanced on her arm and her hand reaching out to wave in front of his face. “Hello?” she said. (Her voice was _heavenly_.)

“Hi,” he said and as inelegant as it was, it was better than jumping in shock for having been caught so obviously staring into nothing. He smiled at her in a way he hoped was charming.

“I didn’t mean to startle you,” she said. He would have protested but she pulled a pink slip of paper off the top of her books and turned it around to show him his own face with the word ‘Slut’ across the bottom. “I hope you don’t think I’m the worst person in the world but I really want to know the story behind these. I’ve been throwing them away when I find them, you may not be surprised how many of them ended up in the girl’s bathrooms.”

“I really wouldn’t be,” Ezio said. He took the paper out of her hand and sighed at it. “It’s not nearly as interesting a story as you might think it would be.” All the various ways he had dreamed of introducing himself to Cristina, he really never thought that it would be because of a piece of paper printed off by some faceless accuser. 

“I’d love to hear it anyway,” Cristina said. She smiled at him in a way that made his heart seize up in his chest and what was his pride and his contempt for the petty revenge in the face of her smile? “I mean, I don’t want to be pushy. There were a couple of versions going around and I know you didn’t have sex with the Dean’s wife.” She might have professed to ‘know’ it but she still stared at him for a breath before she moved to sit next to him.

“That’s what they said?”

“Well, I heard the website you went to print these was on the school’s server or something? So they figured it had to be someone with high level access. And I mean, they were everywhere. Until that weird guy with the white hoodie started ripping them down.” 

Ezio balled up the paper and stuffed it into his bag. “I hate to disappoint you. None of the stories are true. I got caught in between two idiots in love and didn’t get out of the way fast enough.”

Cristina had an impressive sympathy grimace. “Ouch. That is much less exciting than the one where you had sex with the two sisters and their mother.”

“What?” Ezio demanded. “Who said that?” 

“There’s another one where you had a threesome with Mrs. Boon and the guy that wears the mascot costume at football games. According to that one, Mr. Boon is the one that designed the posters.” She couldn’t keep herself from giggling at the ridiculousness of it. Mrs. Boon wouldn’t even have bothered to glance at Ezio (and who honestly would try to have sex with the world’s least approachable woman?) and Ezio didn’t even know who wore the mascot costume. “Your face,” she said, “oh my God. They were ridiculous. I think you’re three-quarters of the way to becoming an urban legend.”

“Just what I wanted,” Ezio said. “Were there any that were at least believable?”

“Well, there was the one where you had drunken sex with Leonardo—you know the TA from World Art History that always flunks people that like Michelangelo? There’s a whole set of stories about him because someone said it looked like his style. It wasn’t quite as ridiculous as—are you okay?” She looked worried all at once, “I said something stupid.”

“No, no. It wasn’t you.”

Cristina put her hand on his shoulder and smiled at him with all the gentle reassurance in the whole world. She said, “it’ll blow over. Nobody really cares. When something better comes along, nobody will even remember about this.” Then she stood up and smiled at him before she said good bye and that she’d see him around. (But not in class because she might never realize he existed again.)

\--

Leonardo had more forgiveness in his heart than Ezio had in the whole of his body. When Ezio showed up in a rage (after dwelling on rumors) spitting vile things about Malik around, “he just wants the rest of the world to be miserable little assholes like he is.”

Leonardo was there with great magnanimity and patience: “That’s not true. You didn’t see him. I don’t appreciate being dragged into his revenge plans but whatever he did was because he was hurt.”

“I don’t care,” Ezio said, “the whole campus thinks I’m a granny-banger or sleeping with entire families or having drunken one night stands _with you_. Whatever I did was momentary, what he’s done just won’t _stop_.” He couldn’t even figure out what part of it made him angrier, the fact that people he’d never met were so easily accepting of his supposedly terrible nature or the fact that Leonardo’s name had been dragged down with his. “He probably hasn’t even apologized to you yet.”

“Actually he did,” Leonardo said. He was sitting across the room in the paint-speckled arm chair that he claimed allowed him better inspiration (thus why it moved around so much) with his feet propped up on a box of wood and metal scraps that Ezio didn’t remember being there a few days ago. “He apologized when he asked to stay at my apartment. I was still mad because of the posters but when I think about it, I’m pretty sure he knew I was going to call you.”

“I’m trying to be angry,” Ezio said.

“I prefer to try to be understanding,” Leonardo countered. “I find it makes for a better world. But if you really want to be angry about something, you could be angry that the rumor mill thinks you’re such a terrible lay that I was moved to make a perfect line drawing of your face and wall paper the school in insults.”

Ezio snorted at that and couldn’t help but smile at the way Leonardo was grinning at him. The whole idea of it was so ridiculous that he couldn’t stop from laughing. He was half sunk into the couch when he finished, hands on his chest and a heaving sigh of peace before he felt still and good again. 

“If you knew it was such a bad idea, why did you agree to it?” Leonardo asked. When Ezio looked over at him he said: “kissing Altair,” as a means to explain himself. 

“Oh. Because I’ve only known Malik for a matter of months and I know how difficult he can be and Altair just looked—heartbroken. It was stupid, I knew it was stupid but if you were there, you would have done the same thing.” 

Leonardo made a noise that was neither agreement nor disagreement. He was looking at Ezio face with his eyes squinting in a way that had nothing to do with artistic appreciation (as he once explained how he’d been caught staring at people too often in his life). “I don’t know Altair except by what you’ve told me about him. But it’s all done now and we have to move on and try to do better the next time with what we know now.”

Right. Because life was so simple. Ezio sneered at the very insinuation, then flopped back against the dusty couch. “Want to move on to get some pizza with me?” He gave his best pout when Leonardo looked at him with incredulity and even offered to pay.

\--

Malik didn’t come back to the room (as far as Ezio knew) until the Wednesday after he’d left with Altair. He came back dragging his feet, stinking of flavored coffee (hazelnut a decidedly noticeable and unwelcome smell), before he collapsed into his bed still wearing his work clothes. The bag he carried everywhere with him was only half zipped with a heap of clothes falling out of it that tipped it over to hit the floor. A collection of pens spilt out and Malik didn’t seem to notice or care beyond toeing off his shoes so he could crawl farther onto his bed and hide beneath his blankets.

Ezio had been on his way out anyway so he turned off the light and closed the door.

\--

Thursday morning reminded him exactly why he hadn’t missed Malik. His seven AM alarm was the world’s most obnoxious combination of chirping-and-buzzing and he slept through it for ten straight minutes before Ezio got out of bed and beat him with a pillow.

Malik kicked him in that knee-jerk way that meant he reacted without thinking again. Ezio fell over and hit the desk with his face, catching the corner of it with his _mouth_ and almost blacked out at the intensity of the pain. “Oh shit,” he heard Malik say from somewhere behind him just before he fell out of bed in his haste to get over to Ezio.

There was blood all over Ezio’s hand when he touched it to his face, blood in his mouth and blood on his chin slipping down to his neck. He’d had enough fist-fights in high school to know the difference between serious bleeding and the way mouth and scalp injuries bled excessively but not dangerously. “Asshole,” Ezio said. To Malik’s clearly concerned face and to the alarm that was still going off all around them. 

“Shit,” Malik repeated. He turned the light on without moving away and flinched when he saw Ezio’s face (oh good, it was _atrocious_ ). He leaned forward far enough to get his fingers on either side of the white-hot-swelling of pain on Ezio’s top-and-bottom lip before he hissed in disgust (or sympathetic pain). “You need stitches.”

Ezio punched him in the shoulder and Malik fell over. “You’re taking me,” he managed to say through the meaty-wet mess of his face. He found a shirt and some pants while Malik dug through his bag for his wallet and found Ezio’s keys in the scatter of things on the short shelf by his bed. He got a towel from the bathroom and left the room long enough to come back with an ice pack that looked like it belonged in a grade schooler’s lunch bag. 

\--

“You officially owe me explanation for freaking out when you’re touched.” Ezio was a miserable looking wretch in waiting room of the closest ER to the hospital. He was eighteen-almost-nineteen (thank God) so nobody said they had to call his parents. They would figure it out anyway; his mother had a six sense for when he’d behaved recklessly or stupidly and gotten hurt as a result. She would storm the ER just as soon as it kicked in and he would be subjected to her telling him all about how he used to do stupid things as a child and almost decapitated himself that one time. 

“Attacked,” Malik corrected. He was still wearing his yesterday-work-clothes with blood stains on the buttoned-cuffs. His hair was noticeably unwashed and his cheeks were covered in a frighteningly thick layer of scruff. There was a sign on the door that led back to the Triage nurse that warned against further cell phone use but Malik was still texting someone while they waited. 

The lady with the sick toddler was staring at them like she was simultaneously impressed and horrified to see them. Or maybe she just didn’t understand why they were sitting in the little chairs with the teddy bears on them watching Spongebob instead of across the room where all the grown-ups were clutching tissues full of green-gobs of snot. 

“You tried to break my nose the first time I touched your shoulder.”

Malik rubbed his left arm in the space between shoulder and elbow before he put his phone to sleep and turned it face-down on his leg. “I don’t feel like I _owe_ you an explanation, but when I was a sophomore in high school I wrote a mean article about one of the seniors who turned out to be a sadistic narcissist or something. He and his three meathead friends beat me up and broke my arm in a door. I spent like two months in the hospital, worst summer vacation ever.” 

“Shit,” Ezio said. Because, well, _shit_. He shifted the towel around until he found a clean square of it to wrap over the ice pack and pressed it back against his mouth. “What did Altair do?”

Malik said, “nothing,” but there was no way it was truth. His hand tightened on his arm and his eyes went all blank and even if Malik weren’t the world’s least believable liar, there was just no way Altair let four people walk away free after they hurt Malik. “The meatheads got probation and community service or something and the sadist went to jail.”

“I guess I got off easy then,” Ezio said.

“I don’t think you’ll be saying that when you get a good look at your face in the mirror.” Malik turned his phone back over to check for messages and when he found none put it back face-down on his lap. “I’m sorry, by the way.”

Ezio waved his hand in the air and slouched a little farther in his seat to get a better look at the cartoon.

\--

Predictably, his mother called as they were leaving the hospital. Ezio was high on pain killers with a prescription for more in hand and he told her the whole story of how he’d busted his face in gleeful-twisting Italian while Malik drove him to the closest pharmacy.

\--

Mama was standing outside the door with her arms crossed angrily over her chest and a frown on her face that seemed to have scared away anyway that attempted to enter the building because there was almost nobody at all coming or going. There was, most noticeably, Altair who was sitting cross-legged on the square-end of the bannister with a book in his lap and his hood up over his head. 

“I told you,” Ezio slurred at Malik who didn’t look like he cared that he had been informed Mama would arrive to assess the situation with her own eyes. He might have said something else but Altair was suddenly standing right in front of him. There he was, with his head tipped the side and his expression curiously blank as he took in the damage and reached out with his thumb to brush across the blank numb space where the doctor had sealed the open edges of his new wound. 

“You should see the other guy,” Ezio said, “he won’t mess with me again.”

“Ezio!” that was Mama, clearing her way to him. It was her hands on his face and her concerned face that frowned at his recently-fixed lip. “You’re coming home.” There was no space for argument and even if there had been, Ezio was too damn tired and too damn high on pain killers to be the one that made it.

\--

Ezio was rich. It wasn’t a secret but something that didn’t come up in conversation as often as some people would have thought. He had been raised in the lap of luxury (so they said) and something about a silver spoon and all of that nonsense.

“I’m bored,” Ezio told Petruccio when he found him sitting in the sunroom with his face pressed against the glass. “What are you doing?” The backyard was a dull spot in the early months of the year, the gardeners maintained what was still alive and planned for spring. There was still space to play basketball and soccer (not that Petruccio often had the opportunity to play either) but without the colors of spring, summer and fall it was a green-and-brown blur. Nothing at all to look at with such interest. 

Petruccio smiled at him and shrugged his shoulders. His face was pale(r) and he sat back into one of the chairs he must have pulled over to the glass. “I was looking for feathers.”

“For the love of—” Ezio reached out and put his hand against Petruccio’s forehead, let his hand be shoved away when the boy sneered at his concern. For a moment, he thought that he should probably put some effort into convincing his brother back to the safety of the warmer indoors. Except for the glare he got, except for the way Petruccio was braced for such an attempt. “Did you find any?” he asked. “Are there even birds this time of year?”

“Of course there are birds. There are always birds!” Petruccio mumbled a reproach in Italian that would have had their mother shrieking at him about manners. (Such small boys were expected to still have theirs.) Then he turned back and tapped his finger against the glass. “There’s one right there.”

“I’ll get it,” Ezio said. “Keep a watch out for Mom.”

\--

Claudia had grown into a girl far faster than anyone could possibly have predicted. During the early days of their childhood they had been friends—back when she was more concerned with keeping up with him and Federico than she was with whatever insanity possessed girls to turn into shrill-sounding harpy beasts. Back then, she chased him down in the dirt with her hair in knots and her bony elbows always ready to dig into his side when necessary.

But then she suddenly became irreversibly _female_ and nothing had ever been the same.

“What did you do?” was how she greeted him when she found him trying to figure out what he could eat that would cause the least amount of pain. (Yes, and he’d found the pain medicine his mother had left for him and he was just hungry and slightly buzzed.) 

“I lost a fight with a desk. Why aren’t you at school? Isn’t it…Thursday?” There was yogurt that looked promising. He dug around in the assortment of pink flavors for something that didn’t have _strawberry_ in it. 

“It’s _Friday_. And I’m sick.” She stood behind him, fully dressed with makeup and hair spray, arms over her chest and a look of contempt. 

“You don’t look sick.” He found a lone Boston Crème yogurt in the very back of the bunch that looked tolerable and got a spoon out of the drawer. 

“I’m sick of you,” she retorted.

Ezio rolled his eyes and put his hands up in defeat. There was no point in trying to work out what was going on behind Claudia’s pointless anger. He left the kitchen, walked through the (mostly) empty house to the back room with the big TV and flopped back into the recliner with the remote in hand. He was flipping through mid-morning TV when Claudia came in. 

She made a point of sitting daintily on the couch with her bowl of cereal. 

“Are you just going to do this all day?” she asked when he changed the channel. 

“Yes,” Ezio said.

“Of course you are.”

He ignored her for four minutes and one more channel change before she huffed as if she had been treated poorly and shoved herself up to leave. She sneered at him as she left and he stuck his tongue out at her. 

\--

By mid-afternoon his brain was so numb from watching bad TV that he was thinking fondly of all of the classes he was missing. He found his phone in yesterday’s clothes and after digging through the drawer of spare chargers, found one that fit the phone so he could plug it in and send an SOS to any of his friends he knew had cars.

Please save me. Please.

\--

Claudia found him in his room because annoying him was a highlight of her day. He was trying to convince Leonardo that he didn’t actually have to finish a commission on time. Artists were supposed to be slightly flighty and often tardy. (Leonardo himself was often both things.) Ezio was breaking down to begging (not really) but Leonardo was insistent that he had to stay and finish what he started. 

“Why are you still here?” Claudia asked.

“Why are you in my room?” Ezio was frowning at his phone, daydreaming about crowded dorm rooms and trying very hard to ignore his sister.

She came in to pick at things on his shelf with one arm across her belly and an undecided air about her. Normally, she was like a wild animal—vicious and uncontrollable. The restrain was a new quality that he wouldn’t have expected. “Do you remember that time that kid on the playground told everyone that I peed my pants?”

No. He didn’t respond because he felt the utter lack of care on his face conveyed it properly.

“You should,” she said with her shoulder pushed up against the decorative edge of his shelves. “You pinned him to the side of the slide and told him you were going to cut his penis off and he peed his pants.”

“Yes,” Ezio said. They’d moved shortly after that incident, but he remembered the snotty little kid that had tormented his sister for months. Remembered what a little coward he was when someone his own size showed up and gave him a taste of his own medicine. Ezio was about to ask what the hell that had to do with anything but when he looked up Claudia was frowning into mid-space with her arms hugged around her body. 

“What happened?” Ezio asked. 

“I was dating a boy,” she said, “he cheated on me and I tried to call him out on it and he told everyone I blew him for money.” The look on her face when she looked right at him was absolute murder. His sister was an annoyance to him but she was _his_ annoying little sister and slowly-but-surely everyone had come to understand you didn’t mess with her. 

“Tell me his name,” Ezio said.

\--

Father came home before Ezio could come up with a reason to leave the house that his mother would agree to let him take a car for. Then there was dinner and small talk about business. Petruccio ratted him out for finding him feathers and Mama scolded them both for playing on the sunroom when it was such a chilly day. Claudia wore her sick-in-bed pajamas and played the perfect part of a perfectly ill patient all through the meal.

They broke apart after dessert with Claudia professing a deep need to go back to bed. Mama swept Petruccio away to his room. Father finished his glass of wine before he went to his office, pausing only long enough to compliment the improvement to Ezio’s face. (With good humor.)

Ezio checked his phone (hoping Leonardo had changed his mind) and found Altair had replied to his SOS.

‘I’ll come, where do you live’ was all it said. 

\--

Whatever was wrong with Malik that made him wake up at seven in the morning every-day-of-the-week was also wrong with Altair because he drove from the campus to Ezio’s house (almost a two hour drive, mind) in the murky-gray-dark of morning to arrive at his door at eight-AM. 

“What is wrong with you,” Ezio asked when he opened the door for him. He was clutching his phone that had woken him up in one hand and scratching at his tangled hair with the other. “Like, is this just a thing for you two? Who started it?” His mouth was dry and his lip was raw and he really-really-missed-sleep. 

“Your house was easy to find,” Altair said. He stepped inside of it and looked over his head at the high ceiling and then around at the obviousness of great wealth before he looked back at him. “I usually get lost.”

“Yeah, whatever. Let me get dressed. The kitchen is that way,” he waved behind him, “go find something to eat. You disgust me.” He wandered off to get dressed and gather up the things he wanted to take back to the dorm with him (some games he’d forgotten he had). It was less than half-an-hour when he came back down to the kitchen.

Claudia was standing in the kitchen chatting at Altair like a cat in heat and Altair was standing behind the kitchen island with his hands in his pockets looking distinctly frightened. He had even taken the extra precaution of putting his hood up. 

“Leave him alone,” Ezio said. He dug a banana out of the fruit basket on the island and went into the pantry to steal a few snack bags for the ride back. “Tell Mama I had to go back, make up something that makes me sound responsible.”

“What about the thing,” Claudia asked.

“I’ll take care of it. You just call him and tell him where you want to meet, and make sure he’s there.” He got a bottle of water out of the fridge and offered one to Altair who took it with a nod of thanks before turning all of his attention back to Claudia.

\--

It wasn’t until they were standing by Altair’s car parked all the way at the end of the drive that Ezio realized there was no Malik. “Where’s Malik?” he asked as soon as it occurred to him. 

Altair shrugged. 

“What is that? Do you not know where he is? Did you have a fight? Does he know you’re here?” Ezio was considering calling the whole thing off because the last place he wanted to be twice was between the two idiots.

Altair just rolled his eyes. “I assume he’s working on his paper right now. We didn’t fight, except about how he uses too many commas, and I told him I was coming to rescue you from your family. Who are you beating up for your sister?”

“Some dick,” Ezio said. He threw his stuff in the small back seat of the car and climbed into the front. His elbow was rubbing up against Altair’s (because they were neither of them smallish types) over the center console. “How’d you know?”

“In high school they called me a psychopath. There were plenty of people that asked me to take care of their problems for them. I never did it but the rumor persisted.” Altair started the car and then turned to look at him.

“Like how you didn’t do anything to the guys that hurt Malik,” Ezio said. (No brain, his brother always said, just balls. Otherwise he might have remembered that nothing good was to come of mentioning such a thing.)

“No, I hurt them,” Altair said. Then he shrugged again. “I could have done worse but they gave up early. Where do you need me to take you?” 

\--

Ezio had lived a life of stereotypical rumors. He was Italian, with an accent, with an affluent family and a slight leaning toward physical retribution for verbal slurs. He’d been asked about the mafia many times in his life, lived through a dozen idiots snickering when they asked about ‘the family’ and ignored anyone that said anything about ‘sleeping with the fishes’ or horse heads. But riding in a car with Altair on his way to meet and intimidate some jerk that hurt his sister might have been the most he’d ever felt like a mafia enforcer-hit-man type. 

“How’d you learn to fight?” Ezio asked.

“Bullies.” 

“You were bullied?” (No brain.)

“I don’t understand how that surprises you. As I understand it I fit in with all of the typical targets, I’m mixed-race, I was small and thin as a child, I’m socially awkward, I have an unusual home life—”

“Right, right. You’re just...I’m not saying that you’re intimidating but I wouldn’t pick a fight with you.” He opened a pack of fruit snacks and offered one to Altair who shook his head. It was hard to tell from the side but it looked almost like he was smiling at the road. “So, you learned to fight to defend yourself?”

Altair snorted at that. “I learned to fight to get even. I figured out the secret was to be meaner and faster. If they’re afraid of you, they won’t tell on you.” The smile was gone again. 

\--

They planned to meet the jerk (who’s name Ezio had forgotten but who’s picture he had on his phone) at a park. It was an hour and a half of climbing on picnic tables and watching Altair easily scale tall trees before the jerk decided to show up. When he came he looked exactly like every high school jerk Ezio had ever known. 

It only took about seven steps and the jerk looking up from his phone with a pleased smile on his face to see nobody at all there waiting for him but Ezio (who was standing on a picnic table) to realize that Claudia had tricked him. “Stupid bitch!” the jerk shouted before he turned tail and ran for it. 

Ezio jumped off the picnic table seconds before Altair dropped out of the tree he’d been climbing. The jerk had his hand on his car door when Altair caught him by the back of the jacket and spun him away from it, pushing him neatly across the parking lot toward Ezio. 

“I’m sorry!” the jerk said as soon as Ezio had his fists in his shirt. “I was stupid and I’m sorry and I’ll fix it.” He was babbling other things, generalized apologies and acknowledgements of his own terrible nature. (Ezio was well known at school, because nobody intelligent ever-ever touched his sister.)

Ezio slammed him against the side of his car and got so close he could smell the presumptive stink of his body spray. “If you ever come anywhere near her again I will put you in the ground.” He pulled him off the side of the car and shoved him into it again. “You go to school and you tell all of your idiot friends that you were wrong, understand?”

“Yes!” 

Ezio let him go and took a step back, considered the way the jerk was still flinching and then slapped him—not even hard enough to leave a mark—and spit at his feet. “Go,” he snapped at him.

\--

The rest of the drive was uneventful. Altair cast no judgment on him, Ezio asked no more stupid questions. They listened to music in peace. 

\--

That was before they parked outside the dorms and Altair tapped his fingers nervously on the steering wheel before resolutely dropping his hand to his lap. He said, “I need to ask you something and I really need you to think about it and not freak out.” The silence dragged after he said it but Altair didn’t look away from where he was staring at his steering wheel with amazing intensity. 

“I’ll try,” Ezio said when he realized he was supposed to reply. 

“I love Malik.” (Altair must have taken classes in how to make someone supremely uncomfortable in just a few seconds with limited syllables.) “I think about kissing you.” (This was how Ezio was going to die, in a small car, from a heart attack, because of idiots.) “I don’t know why. I don’t want to.”

“Right there with you,” Ezio said. He couldn’t even muster a laugh at the end of it, couldn’t manage to play it off as light-and-funny because it wasn’t. He licked his lips (and then wished he hadn’t) and said, “uh—when you think about kissing me is it like, sexual or just fond reminiscing?”

Altair squinted at the steering wheel and then shrugged. “If I could figure it out I wouldn’t have asked. I know you aren’t gay. I know you don’t want to be involved but I can’t talk to him about it.”

“I can’t help but think you need to find someone smarter and less involved than me to talk to this about. Like, I get that it’s not something you could talk to Malik about but I’m not sure—” He stopped himself and took a breath to collect the scatter of his thoughts. (Being told he was the subject of illicit fantasies shouldn’t even have been a new thing for him.) “I will try to help you,” he said, “but I think we need a—mediator.”

“Like who?” Altair looked at him then. 

“Leonardo,” Ezio said. (Oh, and from the way Altair’s face went all pink and his jaw tightened, Malik must have told him all about how he went off and had vengeful sex with him.) “Yes,” Ezio said to Altair’s instant anger, “but the man’s a real-life genius.”

“Is he ugly?” Altair asked.

Ezio laughed before he could catch himself. Because it was _ridiculous_ , because Altair was completely _serious_ when he said it, like he could only tolerate the man if he were a troll. It was so damn stupid and so damn understandably _human_. He caught his breath and said, “oh, no he’s pretty?”

“Fine,” Altair said. “I have to work today. When can we talk about this?”

“I’ll text you,” Ezio said. He was going to get out of the car (and as far the fuck away from this conversation as he could get) but he stopped and looked back over at Altair. “Hey,” he said, “thanks for coming to get me.”

Altair nodded. “I couldn’t let you wither and die in your luxurious family mansion. Could you tell Malik to let me know if he wants a ride to work today?”

“Yeah,” Ezio said.

\--

Leonardo took news of his invitation to Altair’s impressive sexual indecision party with grace. “Nope,” is what he said. “You are not dragging me back into this. I told you to get the hell out of the way the first time and you didn’t listen and I got dragged into it. It’s not happening again, I refuse to be party to it.”

Ezio tried reason, then bargaining, then bribing and finally begging. “Please? You can’t leave me to try to figure this out on my own. I have the emotional maturity of a grapefruit! I’m only one step above stupid. I can’t imagine wanting to make out with a guy, please Leonardo, please?”

The silence on the other end of the phone meant that Leonardo was considering it. (That or it meant that he was nodding his head along with Ezio’s professed lack of intelligence.) He said, “I’ll get involved if Malik is involved. I’ve seen what happens to people that go behind his back and I’d rather not end up with my face plastered all over campus.”

“Are you fucking shitting me right now?” Ezio said. He had a better chance of getting Altair to go skinny dipping in the ocean than he had of convincing the man to get Malik involved. (More to the point, he had a better chance of surviving skinny dipping in the ocean with Altair than getting Malik involved.) “Would you want to be invited to a conversation where your boyfriend tries to figure out why he sometimes thinks about kissing other people?”

“Yes. I think it’s kind of ignorant to assume that my boyfriend didn’t think about kissing other people, especially if we were both eighteen. I’m having a hard time understanding why it’s such a problem. The important thing is I’m not going to change my mind, either work it out on your own or leave me out of it.” Leonardo wished him luck, at least, before he left him to stew in his terrible fate. 

“I should have stayed home,” Ezio said to nobody at all.

\--

The very idea of being trapped in the narrow hell that existed between his dorm room and anywhere that Malik or Altair (or at this point even Leonardo) were was so overwhelming and unthinkable that Ezio found himself in the library. (Which, to be fair was exactly the sort of place that Malik and Altair and even Leonardo would find themselves.) It wasn’t that Ezio was illiterate or even that he didn’t enjoy a good book when the occasion called for it but that he was much more interested in things he could see-smell-hear-touch-taste. 

He found himself hiding at the end of a long aisle of new fiction, long-since-comfortable in the old arm chair he’d found there while he worked his way through a book about a lethal assassin-like type that had been wronged by a large faction of mostly uninteresting bad guys. There was almost nothing he couldn’t do once he set his mind to it (reading included) so he was completely engrossed in the story, lost to the world and his own thoughts on it. 

When Cristina found him, he was slouched in the chair with his knee over the side and his chin against his chest while he propped the book up on one of his arms folded across his chest. He was chewing on the corner of his jacket collar on the good side of his mouth, looking like a proper idiot. “Ezio?” she said.

Just to make the whole thing as embarrassing as possible, he fell out of the chair trying to sit up. The librarian who hadn’t bothered to notice his existence the whole time he had been there stopped at the end of the aisle to give him a glare and shush him while he tried to get off the floor. “Cristina,” Ezio said. He slapped the book shut and dumped it behind him on the chair (not even sure what compelled him to hide it). 

She was smiling with such brilliance that he couldn’t even make himself feel ashamed of how imbecilic he felt. “What happened to your face?” she asked. 

He actually touched his lip before he remembered that he’d gashed it open across the top-and-bottom. “Oh, I hit a dresser. It looks much worse than it feels.” Even as his brain screamed at his mouth to shut up before it embarrassed them more, he was saying, “so, what are you doing here…” 

Cristina smiled at him in that way women smiled at cute small children. “Well, I was looking for a hot date. You have no idea how many incredibly handsome guys I find hiding in the library. It’s like a hot guy convention up in the reference section.” 

“Oh.” Then he was left trying to think of what to say next.

“You know, I don’t want to be pushy or anything but a girl could grow old and die waiting for you to ask her out.” She was shifting her bag over her shoulder and smiling at him (always smiling at him) as she nodded toward the exit. “So how about it? Want to go get something to eat?” She looked at his lip with some concern, “something soft for you.” 

\--

They got ice cream and talked about their professor (because Cristina, as it turned out, knew that they had the same class). It was getting dark while they sat on the picnic tables outside of the ice cream shop.

“I have to tell you that all of my girlfriends told me that I should stay away from you.” Cristina said when she had finished the last of the ice cream in her sundae. The pink glow from laughing at their professor’s clear addiction to red pens and strange ties made her smile even more radiant as she propped her chin in her hand and waited for his reply.

“Because of something I have actually done or something I am rumored to have done?” (He thought to himself, this woman was absolutely beautiful, that he could spend hours just looking at her—finding new things to notice. The way her smile was higher on one side, the way her eyes narrowed when she was listening to him, the loose hairs that fell out of her pony tail and curled in front of her ears.) 

“One of them said that you were gay but very closeted. One of them said that you were very charming but shallow. And one of them said that you just attract trouble.” Cristina put up her fingers as she counted each thing off. “But for the record, I don’t subscribe the theory that sexuality has to be a rigid thing so even if you secretly had a thing for guys I wouldn’t necessarily call it a deal-breaker.”

“I don’t,” Ezio said. 

“I heard you were getting hot and heavy with this guy at a bunch of parties,” Cristina said.

Of course he’d heard that because the universe hated Ezio more than it hated anyone else. He dropped his head down to knock his forehead against the picnic table and then straightened up again. “Yes, but that was a charade. He’s my roommate.”

“Why would you pretend to be interested in your roommate?” 

“Sex,” Ezio said. And he smiled at the way Cristina burst out laughing at him because it was stupid-and-ridiculous. “You can laugh if you want but it worked out exactly as planned. Some women think a man that’s willing to investigate possible homosexual leanings is very attractive.”

“You’re so stupid,” Cristina said when she stopped laughing. “So shallow but charming is the true one?”

“I do have the ability to be charming but it doesn’t seem to work whenever you’re around. I think the idea that having or enjoying sex being equal to being shallow isn’t fair.”

“Fair enough.” Cristina folded her napkin for a moment. “I feel like I’m doing all of the asking. Why don’t you ask me something?”

Ezio’s mind went blank so suddenly it was surprising that he hadn’t gotten vertigo from the sudden emptiness. He smiled (stupidly) while he tried to think of (anything) something to ask. “Favorite kind of cheese?”

Oh-and-she-laughed.

\--

Malik was glowering at his laptop when Ezio finally made it back to the dorm room. He looked away from it long enough to see Ezio and then went right back to glaring with the full force of his hatred. 

Ezio took a shower and collapsed in his bed, dug around behind the mattress for the phone charger and checked his messages. There were two from Claudia not-thanking him for his interference. There was one from Leonardo that was too long to read on the preview so he skipped it. Then there was one from Altair from less-than-two-minutes ago.

‘Is he working on his essay?’

Ezio looked over at Malik and then texted back, ‘think he’s got writer’s block. You should drag him back to your bed so I can get some sleep.’

He scrolled through the messages that his mother sent him about how he had better be following the doctor’s instructions about how to care for his wound. She insisted that even if his father though the scar would add character to his face, Ezio himself wouldn’t like having the scar be noticeable the rest of his life.

There was one from Federico demanding to know why he had to find out from their mother that Ezio tried to perform his own plastic surgery. 

Then Altair responded with, ‘Desmond is here.’

‘What a cock-blocking dick,’ Ezio said. He went back to his brother’s angry tirade about how he should have gotten some kind of message, or at very least a picture. Ezio crawled back out of bed to go take a picture of his garish looking lip in the mirror to send to him. 

‘I don’t think we have as much sex as you think we have,’ Altair had sent back. ‘I don’t like Desmond though. He’s afraid of me.’

Ezio snorted at that. ‘At least you don’t have to worry about him taking your stuff. Maybe you should try having more.’ And then after that one, ‘sex I mean, not stuff. Malik looks like he needs it.’

Federico complimented the improvement to his looks and Ezio accused him of being too much like their father. They fell into calling each other names like they were still children.

‘I would do it if he asked,’ Altair said.

‘Why can’t you ask him?’ (Crippling inability to express oneself using words, obviously.) Ezio went back through his messages to find the one from Leonardo and opened it up. It said:

‘Obviously I don’t know much about Altair, but if you have the chance, ask him about when he thinks about kissing you, specifically if he has ever thought about anyone else besides Malik. I’m still not getting involved. This is not getting involved.’

Ezio was going to tell him it was the actual definition of getting involved but before he could finish typing it he got another message from Altair.

‘It just seems really awkward. I like having sex with him and I think about it and I want to but having to start it is really difficult. Now that we’ve done some of it, I thought it would be easier but it’s not, its worse.’ Then, right after, ‘Desmond has sleep apnea. Or he is pretending to be asleep and keeps holding his breath.’

‘I’m pretty sure if you showed up right now and said ‘sex’ Malik wouldn’t even care how awkward you think it is. I’d even go sleep somewhere else because I’m a great friend.’ Who had to counsel his roommate’s boyfriend on a frequent basis. All because he’d made friends with Altair out of his own survival instinct. 

‘You obviously have never interrupted him while he’s writing a paper,’ was what Altair sent him. 

The pain meds he’d taken before his shower were making him groggy so he sent, ‘no, he always looks so serious.’ Then he put his phone to sleep and pulled his blanket up to his shoulders as he yawned and rolled onto his side. “No throwing books,” he said to Malik.

“I make no promises.”

\--

As far as Ezio remembered, nobody had ever given Altair a key to the room but the fact that the door was frequently left locked had never stopped him from getting in. He showed up at seven AM wearing his white-hoodie-gray-pants (Malik once told him it meant bad things) and kicked Ezio’s bed. 

“Go running with me,” Altair said.

“Can’t you just kill me and be done with it?” Ezio asked. He uncovered his head and looked over at the bed where Malik was _not_ and then looked up at him.

“Writer’s block,” Altair said, “he’s probably wandering around campus talking to himself. Or he fell asleep outside the library again. You’re getting fat, come running with me.” 

Ezio got up and after finding clothes suitable for exercise, let himself be dragged outside. 

\--

“When I said kill me,” Ezio said as he leaned against the side of the building they’d stopped by, “I meant, like, kill me quickly. Not this thing where you drag it out and make me suffer first.” He was soaked in sweat and still trying to catch his breath while Altair did easy little circles in front of him, breathing evenly as he cooled off from running. His hair was so thick with sweat it was standing on end the way the length of Ezio’s was dripping down his neck and stuck in his eyes. 

“You did good,” Altair said. He stuck his hands in his pockets and stopped walking in circles.

Ezio stood up straight and pushed all of his hair back away from his face. It dragged wetly across his cheeks and forehead and got caught in the corner of one of his eyes. “If you say so. Do you run like this every day?”

“No, usually I run for longer.” Altair grinned at him like a shithead and then nodded across the street toward an unremarkable looking diner. “Breakfast?” He waited for Ezio to nod before he led the way. When they were inside the waitress that sat them recognized Altair and held an entire conversation with him all the while never expecting a response. She even brought him back a glass of water that he hadn’t asked for.

“I see you come here a lot,” Ezio said. 

“It’s quiet.” Altair didn’t bother looking at the menu that had been left for him but started stacking the little individual packages of jelly into a pyramid. He used the salt-and-pepper packs to fill in the empty spaces like mortar between bricks. 

Ezio ordered when the waitress came back and thanked her. She looked at Altair and said, “the usual?” and he nodded. She wrote it down with a quick scrawl and said, “where’s the other one?”

“Writer’s block,” Ezio said. But the waitress gave him the stink eye anyway as she picked up the menus and took them away. He waited until she was in the kitchen (probably telling people to spit on his food) before he kicked Altair under the table. It didn’t do anything at all to faze him. “You could have told her that we were just friends.”

“Protesting just makes people believe they’re right.” Altair finished his pyramid and moved on to turning his water glass to leave random wet circles around his finished creation. When he was satisfied with his creation he leaned back against his chair with both hands in his pockets. 

“I’m not sure anyone cares anymore but I’m not actually gay. I don’t actually want to you or Malik.”

“What about Leonardo?” Altair asked.

“No, I don’t want him either.” Ezio took a drink of his soda and grimaced at the way the straw caught on his still-tender lip. “It’s actually possible to be friends with another guy without wanting to have sex with him.”

“But Malik said Leonardo loved you.” The way he said it implied that it must have had some effect on Ezio’s decision to not be attracted to guys. 

“Yeah,” Ezio said. “I know that. There’s not a whole lot I can do about it, is there? I think he’s a great guy and I want to be his friend but what the hell am I supposed to do about the rest? I told him that I’m straight and until your dick of a boyfriend came along, we were getting along fine.”

“Why did you kiss me?” Altair asked.

“You asked me to.”

“Were you afraid that I’d hurt you if you didn’t?” Altair could have gone into detective work with the clean-unfeeling way he interrogated a person. (Also, no wonder people in his high school thought he was a psychopath. His voice could drop all emotion and his face could go perfectly blank right in front of your face. All that remained was the intensity of his amber-brown eyes staring straight _through_ you.) 

“No. I kissed you because I felt really bad for you.”

Altair frowned at that, just briefly, just for a moment. “You kissed me for fifteen minutes,” Altair said, “how bad did you feel?”

Ezio was never going to do anything for anyone ever again. He was going to turn bitter and old at eighteen years old and swear off random acts of kindness. When asked what made him turn so misanthropic, he would cite this very moment. Or maybe the very next one when the waitress came back and set his plate in front of him with a continuing frown. “I can’t believe you timed it,” Ezio said.

“I counted the seconds,” Altair said.

“No you didn’t.”

“No, I didn’t. But I have an exceptional internal clock. You could continue to sit there and be embarrassed and angry but what I’m really asking is why you agreed to kiss me.”

“Why’d you ask me?” Ezio asked.

That made Altair pause. He looked at his plate for a moment and then leaned forward and set into putting it into order, upturning a bottle of hot sauce over the diner-staple of eggs-and-hash browns. He ate through a third of it before stopping to drink the rest of his water and licking the food stuck between his teeth and cheeks. “I asked you because I trusted you.”

“Well, I did it because you’re my friend and you needed help.” His own food was unsurprisingly mediocre. He wasn’t sure if that was the usual far or if the waitress had turned the chef against him. (Not that it mattered.) “And on that subject, you said you thought about kissing me—is it only me? Like have you thought about kissing other people?”

“Malik.”

“Anyone else?” 

“No,” Altair said. He set his cup on the edge of the table and pushed his food around his plate like a sullen grade-schooler. “I don’t think I want to have sex with you. I don’t feel the same way toward you that I feel toward Malik. That’s why it’s confusing—I don’t want you. I just think about kissing you sometimes.” He shrugged at it.

“Maybe it’s just how your brain interprets friendship. I mean, you’ve been in love with your best friend for years.” 

Altair was staring at him again, didn’t even bother to acknowledge the waitress when she came with another glass of water. After a moment he said, “that was actually a really decent idea.” (It would have been more of a compliment if he hadn’t said it like he was honestly surprised.) Then he picked up his fork again and started to eat. “You should come running with me again. You really are getting fat.” 

Ezio gave him the finger; Altair smiled at him like an idiot.


	5. Chapter 5

Altair did not like Desmond. In his bedroom, last year, when he was still practicing his speech, it was important to him that he was close enough to Malik to find him when he wanted -to. But here, now, with Desmond taking up his rightful space in the too-small room, Altair thought of every word he’d memorized and repeated to his grandmother and thought her knowing smile and slight little nod made all the sense in the world. 

\--

Ezio screamed like a girl whenever he was surprised. That wasn’t to imply that girls screamed with any greater regularity than men but rather that Ezio’s normally masculine voice turned into a shrill high-pitched soprano when he was startled. He had the habit of jumping out of the path of whatever shocked him and ending up doing a rolling-fall to the ground with his feet in the air and his bag of books going sailing across the path. 

Altair let go of the ledge he was hanging from and landed on his feet. 

“Asshole!” Ezio shouted from the ground. He was sitting with his legs sprawled open, shoving the books he could reach back into his bag with his face gone all beautifully crimson with embarrassment. “Can’t you walk?”

“I was walking,” Altair said, “on the roof.” It was exponentially faster than trying to elbow his way through the crowds. There weren’t many people that looked up to see him, so as long as he was careful to drop to the ground out of the way of crowds he usually went fairly undetected. “I need to do something about Desmond.”

“Beat up your own problems,” Ezio said. He rolled over onto his knees and pushed himself up to his feet, stooping to grab the last of the books that were flying everywhere. He was still flushed with embarrassment when a small cluster of women walked past them. They must have looked at Ezio with some interest because he put his pleasing smile on his face and mumbled some excuse for the sorry state he was in. When they were gone he turned all of his attention to Altair. “We established ground rules.”

“This is not the window in your dorm,” Altair said, “I did not accost you before eight in the morning. And I don’t think this makes you look gay.” He was standing more than five foot away from Ezio, hands to himself, all wayward thoughts about sticking his tongue in Ezio’s mouth safely tucked away and unmentioned. 

“Well add, falling from the sky without warning to the list.” He took a breath to calm himself and pulled the hair tie out of his hair before straightening his constantly messy ponytail. When he was a far more composed version of himself, he said, “what is your problem with Desmond?” And then picked up his bag. He started walking with the clear implication that Altair should follow him if he wanted to continue to talk. 

“He exists,” Altair said.

“I don’t think I can solve that for you.” 

“Yesterday he showed up with all of his belongings and said that the friend he had been staying with ‘no longer wanted him around’ and then apologized that he had to be there all the time from now on. Now he’s there, and he’s very nervous all the time.”

Ezio stopped walking long enough to give him a confusing sort of stare that seemed to mean more to Ezio than it did to him. He licked his lips and put one of his hands up as if to demonstrate some grand point, seemed to decide it was stupid and then dropped his hand and said. “I believe Malik is the one that hands out survival guides to people. I don’t want to be that friend.”

“Malik hates him too,” Altair said.

“Well that’s because Malik wants to get laid like a good rational person,” Ezio said, “I’ve heard his rant about Desmond and it made sense.” 

Altair rolled his eyes. They had walked to the end of the path and stopped in front of one of the oldest benches on campus. Ezio was dropping his bag there like it was exactly where he meant to go and not some unfortunate accident. There was almost nobody that came to this place (Altair knew because he frequently used it to climb off the roof) and yet Ezio was sitting down with a perfectly crafted careless sprawl of limbs. “You aren’t going to help me.”

“Nope,” Ezio said.

“I hope she is ugly and riddled with venereal diseases,” Altair said. Then he walked to the end of the path and ran up the side of the building to catch the decorative square that stuck out far enough to be a decent handhold.

\--

Desmond still existed though, in a constant state of occupying half his room. He was skittish and vaguely stupid, always talking to himself as if he expected an answer and then looking embarrassed and scared when he remembered Altair existed. 

\--

The important thing he had learned about being friends with Malik was that everything—no matter how benign and simple it seemed—was a trap. It started when they were very young children when Malik was paired up with him on a project about insects. Altair had been tasked with researching ants and had dutifully gone through the trouble of finding and reading books about ants. He had summarized them and drawn pictures faithfully reproducing what he’d learned.

Malik had gotten angry at him—viciously, spitting angry—about ‘doing all the work without him’ and accused him of ‘trying to make him look stupid’ and some other gibberish that had sounded preposterous at the time. Altair had not apologized, he hadn’t done anything but stand there with his folder of summaries and pictures while Malik threw his hands up in the air and stormed away from him to sit by himself in the reading corner and scribble angrily in his notebook. 

Altair handed in nothing for their report as per Malik’s general request to stop making him look stupid. Altair couldn’t possibly make Malik look anything if he did nothing. They were both rewarded a D on the project and Malik had screamed at him on the playground about trying to ruin his life.

\--

Malik was taller, heavier, friendlier and infinitely more understandable than he had been as an eight year old. But he still brought Altair booby-traps disguised as presents with reassurances of good faith that he was incapable of following through with. Like the essay paper Malik had spent a week crafting with utter precision that was thrown at his face in the middle of the morning.

Altair had been trying to read, irritated at Desmond’s habit of holding his breath at odd intervals, when the door opened and Malik was there. He was dressed in clean clothes, freshly washed, looking decidedly pleased with himself in a way that made him infinitely attractive. He had thrown a stack of papers (held together by a giant paper clip) at him before stripping off the hoodie he’d taken from Altair and his shoes. His smile was the very specific smile he got when he intended to strip Altair down to the skin and reduce him to helpless goo with his hands and mouth. Oh-and-Malik’s eyes were so bright when he put one of his knees on the edge of the bed and the other across his lap. 

It was hard to breath around Malik on good days, but moments like this made him feel like he was being strangled. He dropped the paper to the side and ignored Malik’s fake little frown at his work being treated so poorly. It didn’t matter because the man was wearing a butter-soft T-shirt over his bare skin and he had his whole body arched in against his just begging to be touched and explored.

Altair said, “get out, Desmond.”

And Desmond ran like an obedient little puppy.

Malik-who-was-always-right smiled at him all hot-and-breathless. His mouth was wet-and-mint-toothpaste and his hands were impatient-and-sure when they pulled his clothes off.

\--

But, Altair still had to edit the paper he was given. It was the kind of task that someone disposable should have been given. Throughout the course of their friendship, a dozen (or more) people had accused Altair of imagined injuries inflicted on Malik. (Not that he hadn’t injured Malik plenty but never without being injured in return.) His own grandmother had once sat him at the kitchen table with a plate of blonde brownies and a quiet but serious voice when she asked him what he was trying to get out of Malik. 

They all thought the same—that Malik was corruptible or weak, that he was easy to bend or break. They didn’t know the man that Malik really was, the sort of beast that he could be. They were all like Ezio and Leonardo, misled by the gentleness of Malik’s face, by the harmlessness of his persona. They had never seen him out in the dirt with his bare fists clenched white-knuckle-tight and his spitting fury over the things he hated in his own life. They hadn’t watched him tear apart men-and-women and boys-and-girls that had wronged him before. 

Altair knew. He knew the price of Malik’s respect and how fragile it really was. If he hadn’t known he would have thrown the paper back in Malik’s face and told him he wasn’t willing to be yelled at over commas-again-today. It was all a trap, one that was sure to catch him again. But he read through it, circled and scratched through things that weren’t perfect because he knew (after all these years) that Malik trusted-and-respected-him or he wouldn’t have asked.

\--

The other thing he had learned about Malik was that nobody-not-anyone fucked with his brother. Kadar was half the man his brother was—smaller and simpler and nicer by far. He was well-liked and well-known. While Malik was shrewd and by all accounts instantly distrustful of anyone bearing gifts, Kadar was known to be drawn in by things with shiny prizes.

Altair had made a promise to the skinny-little kid in the mirror when he was only six-or-seven that he wasn’t ever going to hurt anyone that hadn’t hurt him first. He kept to it, as best as he could, picked his fights with the bullies on the playground that threw rocks at him and called him names like she-man and ‘stupid girl’. He found their soft spots and he made them cry and he pinned them down until they apologized and promised to stay away. 

But there was Kadar to think of, stupid little Kadar in fourth grade. He got caught in the bathroom carrying someone-else’s lighter-and-cigarettes. His parents had been in a fine fit full of anger that only parents could be. They hadn’t cared that he swore they weren’t his, they had laid the fullness of their wrath on him—and the school had followed suit. It was only Malik that believed his brother and hunted out the people that were truly responsible. Altair didn’t stalk him, but watched him.

Malik used words as threats. Altair waited until he was gone and he found the idiot fifth grader with a box of matches in his book bag pocket. He waited until the kid thought he was alone, until he pulled one of his spare cigarettes out of his pocket and fished out a match to light it. At ten, Altair was still short-and-thin, easily forgotten and underestimated among boys that were taller and bigger. He didn’t look out of place next to an eight year old that had taken up smoking (he didn’t even care why).

“What do you want?” the kid demanded, “you want your butt whupped?”

Altair kicked him off his stoop, pinned him down with his bony knees on his shoulders and picked the cigarette up off the ground by his head. He leaned in over him, held the smoking end of the cigarette over his eye and said, “do everything Malik told you to do.” He didn’t add a threat, didn’t think that he needed to bother with it because the kid was staring cross-eyed at the cigarette close enough to make his skin prick up pink and start to sweat. His eye watered and his body started shaking. 

Kadar received an apology from the principal and his parents and Malik sailed on with pride at his own accomplishments.

\--

Kadar didn’t like him though. He was more like Desmond than Malik—skittish and strange whenever he was around Altair. Malik used to make excuses for him. Altair accepted them because he understood that excuses made the people that offered them feel better. 

Then, in summer before senior year, Malik had been laying across his bed reading the last of his summer reading list books when he dropped it to the side. He rolled onto his side and looked across the room to where Altair was sketching (Malik laying on his bed, not that he ever offered to share his drawings). He said, “so my family pretty much hates you. Yesterday my Mother told me that she would give me fifty dollars if I didn’t come over here today.”

“You could have bought the calculator you wanted,” Altair said.

Malik grinned at him. He said, “I’d rather have you.” And all at once he stopped making excuses for his family, stopped trying to ‘make it work’, stopped worrying about shaping Altair into something that his parents would approve of (even if only for a moment). He simply never brought it up again. The one time Altair had been invited along with Malik _and_ Kadar (to a movie, of course), Malik had given his brother a glare that might have melted the spine of a lesser person.

Kadar had said only, “hey Altair.” 

Altair had only nodded. 

\--

The Laundromat on the corner of Center-and-Pine was open until midnight for some inexplicable reason. The washers were old-and-noisy and only two or three of the twenty dryers still worked as they were supposed to. Malik had pointed out there were facilities that were in better shape, in better locations, with better seating accommodations but he followed Altair to the Laundromat every week without fail. 

They had never made friends with the girl with all the tattoos that sat at the lonely desk in the back corner of the Laundromat playing on her IPad and listening to music with the bright-red-headphones that covered her ears all-the-time. She knew them by sight though, never bothered to do more than look at them and then back at her IPad. Nobody else ever came to the Laundromat at ten-at-night. 

Malik was sitting in the chair, wearing the black hoodie he’d stolen from Altair, head back against the wall while he stared with a glassy-sort of gaze through the clear door of the front-loading washer they’d thrown all their combined clothes into. His fingers were tapping against his thigh now-and-again like he was keeping track of how many socks he’d seen moving around. 

Altair was sitting on the table that he had been told (many times, always by Malik) was meant to be used to fold clothes on. It was blue and rickety and squeaked when he climbed on it but then stood obedient still once his back was to the wall and his legs were crossed. He had run out of clothes completely since the last time he’d washed them and the only thing he’d had to wear were a pair of gray sweat pants that were scratchy and stupid. “I hate sweat pants,” he said. Malik made a noise of agreement that meant he wasn’t listening. Altair picked at the lint that formed on the outside of the pants and rolled it between his fingers to throw at him. “Who invented these? What are they for? Are they meant to make you sweat more or less?”

“I don’t know,” Malik said. He didn’t care either. “Maybe they’re meant to soak up your sweat.” He scratched the side of his head where the lint ball had hit him and then turned to look at him with a frown. “We could talk about anything but your pants now.” Oh-but-he wanted to call Altair immature and didn’t. The thought was there in the frown lines between his eyes. 

“Fine,” Altair said.

“Fine,” Malik repeated.

\--

The trouble with having secrets was remembering that nobody knew them. It wasn’t usually a problem because there was almost nobody to keep secrets _from_ so it didn’t matter if nobody knew them. Then there was the way that he sometimes found himself thinking about how Ezio had felt leaning across his body with the wet press of his tongue against Altair’s. He thought about Ezio’s hands, how big they’d felt against his bare skin, how sure-and-still-uncertain they were when they touched him. “How many people have you kissed?”

Altair had learned so-very-long-ago that the key to surviving was to never look surprised to have said something. His mouth operated as a separate machine from his brain and it took it upon itself (at times) to say things he hadn’t intended. When he was young he’d been red-with-embarrassment over it, but it wasn’t safe to be embarrassed so he kept his silence and the too-quick-thud-of-his mortified heart to himself.

Malik was still sitting, looking bored and fed up with the mundane nothingness of waiting for the dryers. He tipped his head back to look up at him, tried very hard not to look affronted or surprised. “Uh, are there more parameters than just kissed? Are we counting relatives? Platonic kisses?”

“Count relatives if you want to have sex with them,” Altair said.

That earned him nothing but a raised eyebrow. Malik had attacked Altair’s lack of communication skills with a detectives dogged determination. “Are you asking about people I’ve kissed or people I’ve had sex with?” 

Altair frowned at his knees and then cleared his throat and said, “kissed, I think. Are the numbers very different?” (He didn’t want to know. He didn’t even need to know. It didn’t even matter. He shouldn’t even have asked.)

“Well, I’ve kissed—” There was the finger against his thigh again, counting off people that Altair was going to start hating the second he figured out who they were. People that he didn’t care about right-this-second. The whole world was made up of people that Malik-might-have-kissed and Altair didn’t even care about them. “Five—no, wait.” His cheeks were going faintly pink and then he shrugged at himself. “Like seven or eight,” he said.

“How many people have you had sex with?” (Oh-God-he-couldn’t-shut-up.)

“Three,” Malik said.

In the grand scheme of things, three was a miniscule number. There had to have been others that would have been more-than-happy to have a chance to see Malik with his clothes off. The man was overtly unfriendly to anyone with superficial intentions but he was still fit-and-handsome and _sexual_.

“Me and Leonardo and who else?” Altair asked. 

“Guy I met on the _vacation_.” The one couched between junior-and-senior year when Malik’s family had dragged him away to convince him there were better people to be friends with than Altair. It had gone on for the better part of two weeks before they came back surlier and more resentful than they’d left. Malik had spent the rest of his summer hiding in Altair’s bedroom as often as he could. “What about you?”

“Three if you count the girl that stalked me in senior year,” Altair said. The one that hadn’t been able to understand that his indifference to her existence wasn’t a ploy to make him more attractive. Malik liked to tell him that there was a whole string of broken-hearted women behind him that sighed themselves sick over him. Altair-had-thought it was stupid until the girl pinned him to a wall and kissed him. “And just you.”

“Do you care?” Malik asked.

“I’m not excited that you fucked Leonardo,” Altair said. (Wasn’t excited that he’d finally saw Leonardo by-accident on campus. That the man was every bit as pretty as Ezio said he was, with a gaggle of admirers crowded around him begging for attention.) Then he shrugged, “but no I don’t care. Do you?”

“I think you know how I feel about Ezio. But no, I don’t care.”

\--

Altair did not often think about kissing Ezio when Ezio was around. The thoughts snuck up on him when he was bored and there was no escape to be had. In class, in the library while he searched for books, stuck on an odd break at work without Malik around to amuse him. And now when Desmond slowly died from suffocation because he couldn’t keep breathing.

Malik persisted in ignorance.

Ezio persisted in selective amnesia.

Altair found Leonardo-the-genius sitting at the head of the class he worked as a TA for, bent over a pile of papers with his cheek on his hand and a forlorn kind of heaviness in his shoulders. He was wearing a long-sleeve shirt that was neither red-nor-orange but some bastard child of the two. There was nobody else in the room and Leonardo still didn’t look up when Altair walked up the aisle toward him. He just kept sighing over the papers while he doodled idly on the margins and made faces at whatever he was reading.

“I’m Altair,” he said. Because Ezio-liked-to-talk and there was no way he hadn’t told Leonardo all-about-him. Even if he hadn’t, there was Malik-to-think-of and he must have mentioned him once-or-twice when he showed up at Leonardo’s (apartment? Dorm? House?) to fuck him out of spite. He had his hands in his pockets (because his Grandma always reminded him) and was three-foot-away behind a desk but Leonardo still jerked away from him so fast that he fell over like he’d been hit. “Are you okay?” Altair asked to the empty desk he was look at and the man behind it that had hit the ground with a disastrous sounding thud.

Leonardo pulled himself back to his feet, dusted his clothes off and swooped down to pick his pen up before he sat in the chair. He cleared his throat and looked up at him with a pleasant-teacher-kind of smile that did nothing to hide the fact he was _frightened_. “Yes, hello.”

“I’m not going to hurt you.”

Leonardo’s smile got more painful. 

Altair frowned at him. “Ezio said you were a genius.”

“Ah.” Leonardo might as well have been running for an exit.

“I really am not going to hurt you,” Altair said. He normally didn’t bother to say as much because the assertion that he had no violent intentions seemed to have the opposite effect as the one he wanted. People got more nervous the more he reassured them. “I just have a question.”

Leonardo was staring at him (Altair hated to be stared at) for thirty-one seconds before something changed in the set of his shoulders. He looked embarrassed when he looked away and then cleared his throat and said, “I’m sorry. I’d like to start again.” He got up from behind the desk and came around to stand in front of him. “Hello Altair, I’m Leonardo.” He stuck out his hand for Altair to shake and didn’t even flinch when he shook it. He didn’t stare at his face either, that way people did when they wanted him to look right in their eyes. (He hated that too, for the record.)

“I have a question,” Altair said.

“I will do what I can to answer it.” Leonardo leaned against the desk and put his hands back on the edge of it while he waited. 

“How do I stop thinking about kissing Ezio?” Altair asked.

Oh-and-he-laughed. Leonardo almost fell over again with the sudden explosion of laughter that startled even himself. He bent half-forward and then straightened up and cleared his throat again. “I’m not the person that can answer that question.” 

Altair had seen heartbreak before—saw it in his Grandma’s face every year on his mother’s birthday when they laid birthday cards and store-bought cupcakes on her grave. He saw it in Malik when his family decided that ignorance and hate were more important than their son. “He does care about you,” Altair said.

“Ah, yes. I know this, and if I were wiser I would move and leave no forwarding address. It’s a shame that human beings weren’t created to be wise creatures, I guess.” He shrugged it away. “I do have a theory about you though. Forgive me, I only know what little Ezio felt comfortable sharing. Have you ever heard of asexuality or demi-sexuality?” 

“No.”

“You should look it up,” Leonardo said. “Have you ever been sexually attracted to someone you didn’t know or feel an emotional connection to?”

“No,” Altair said. “Is that what asexuality is? Only being attracted to people I like?”

Leonardo looked reluctant. He said, “it can be. You should look it up when you have time. There’s nothing wrong with imagining, Altair. Everyone imagines.”

“Well, Ezio doesn’t like and I doubt Malik would be understanding.” He stuck out his hand again though and Leonardo shook it. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” Leonardo smiled at him and it was simple-and-genuine. 

\--

Ezio was in Altair’s room when he got back to it. He was sitting a chair, stuck in the middle of a too-loud conversation with Desmond who was making squawking noises that may-have-been something like laughing. They were both grinning like fools, hands stuck out in front of them cupped around some invisible objects. And as soon as they saw him they dropped their arms and started bawling with laughter all over again. 

“Altair!” Ezio said.

“Why are you here?” Altair asked. He couldn’t remember now if he’d ever told Ezio where his room was. It didn’t seem like something that he’d done, but Malik might have told him because Malik was friendly-enough when he wanted to be.

“I am here to invite you to a party,” Ezio said.

“No,” Altair said.

Ezio shrugged, and then looked at Desmond, “then it’s just us.” They were a set of fools, grabbing their jackets. Desmond went first, slipping past Altair with a noticeable flinch of annoyingly persistent fear. Ezio lingered for a moment and put his hand on Altair’s chest as he paused in the doorway. “I like him.”

“Keep him,” Altair said.

“We’ll see how he does tonight.” Then, “And on behalf of you and your boyfriend who needs to get laid, I have graciously offered Desmond free use of Malik’s bed anytime he finds himself thrown out of his own,” before Ezio was off with a flourish. 

\--

One of the very-very first things Altair had ever learned was that sometimes-people-leave and sometimes they-never-come-back. He had been born in a bloody emergency room, gasping his first breath of life while his mother’s final sigh caught in a bubble in her throat. He-couldn’t-possibly remember but the first months of his life had been spent in a black haze of grief and regret.

Altair barely remembered his father, except in the evening when the shadows crept into the corners of sunny rooms and climbed the walls toward night time. He remembered his father’s haggard-face in the evening when he crawled out of bed to work the night shift. In his memory, his father was as tall as a skyscraper and as big as a mountain. His voice was like an avalanche of rocks. But in pictures, he was no bigger than Altair (smaller maybe) was now. His face was fixed forever at thirty-one with half a smile caught as it slipped away.

It had only ever been his Grandmother that stayed with him. She was a perfume-cloud in his distant memory, but she crowded all the spaces of his life before Malik-stopped-hating him and stubbornly inched out all the hurtful things. She had been the one to hug him, the one to hold him when he was scared and couldn’t figure out why. 

By ten-years-old he had seen enough of hurt and heartbreak to know it when he saw it. 

His Grandmother was caught on, ‘you could make friends. There has to be someone you want to be friends with.’ She took him out to sports, to the park, to play place and he’d learned to climb and run. 

“I did something,” he said to her when he couldn’t sleep at ten-years-old with the heavy guilt of threatening the boy with the cigarette wouldn’t leave him. 

Grandma wore nightgowns that kissed the floor and a big-wooly bathrobe when she watched Lifetime after the sky went dark and little boys were meant to be sleeping. She drank wine from tall stemmed glasses and kept a pack of crackers by her side at-all-times. When she saw him she patted the space next to her and turned the TV off. “Tell me,” is what she said.

He looked at his hands, not at her, and he told her about Malik’s-baby-brother and the boy-with-the-cigarettes and how it-didn’t-feel-right. There were no secrets in the house, no secrets between them because he hated liars worse than he hated anything and he never-did-anything he hadn’t-meant-to-do. 

“Why do you think its bothering you?” she asked him.

Altair sighed, “I don’t know.”

“Maybe you should apologize.”

No, that-wasn’t-it. But he nodded his head and promised he would and she kissed him on the head and pulled him up into her arms. He went willingly because he was still-small-at-ten and he thought maybe his mother-might-have been the sort to hug a miserable little-boy. 

\--

Malik found him while he was researching asexuality. He smelled like a mid-afternoon coffee-shop shift when he crawled onto the bed next to him. Altair made room for him without looking away from the screen and Malik rested against his side and read-along-with-him the same way he had for years. They didn’t read at exactly the same speed but they were close because Malik was a dedicated reader that had spent years crafting his skill on purpose and Altair had nothing but free time in the winter when the days were short and his Grandmother wouldn’t let him climb on the roof in the dark.

“Altair,” Malik said.

“Hm?” 

“Why are we reading this?” Malik was sitting up on his own now, carving out a circle of personal space on a bed not even big enough for one person to have enough room. He moved away just enough to cross his legs and wait. 

Altair considered the truth—the variables of it and then he sighed and closed the laptop. He put it back under the bed where it was mostly-safe and pulled his own legs up to cross them. He said, “I think you’ll get mad at me.”

“I think that largely depends on why.” Malik had gotten better at not promising things he couldn’t follow through with. Things like, ‘my parents will come around’ and ‘I won’t get mad if you tell me’. “I’m trying not to jump to conclusions but there are several of them I think are likely.”

“I’m confused,” Altair said.

“About sex?” The curious thing was the fear in the words, the worry in Malik’s face and the way his fingers were still-not-fidgeting but he was still looking at Altair with a distinct sort of desperation. 

“No. I want to have sex with you. I enjoy it.” (Malik looked relieved, at least.) “I just—” (Don’t know what to do, you know. Because I love you like I might be on _fire_ and I don’t want anyone in the world the way I want you but my brain gets messed up sometimes and it starts thinking about things that I don’t want. I keep trying to bury it and it keeps biting back and I’m so-scared-you’ll-hate-me or hate Ezio. I can’t stand the thought of it because he’s-my-friend but I’d drop-him-instantly-if-you-hated-him.) “I haven’t thought much about sex before.”

“That’s not exactly surprising,” Malik said. But he smelled blood, and he knew there was something else. “Do you think about it now?”

Altair nodded.

“When you think about it, is it me you’re thinking of?”

Altair nodded.

Malik narrowed his eyes and thought a moment and said, “is it Ezio?”

Altair nodded. He said, “but, it’s meaningless. I don’t want him, I don’t even like it when I think about it. I was just trying to figure out how to make it stop because it keeps happening.” He was braced for impact, waiting for Malik to start screaming at him because it was-sure-to-come. 

There was silence instead and Malik’s face gone blank-but-angry. It shifted as the silence dragged, from anger to confusion to thoughtful and then back to angry. He blinked and refocused on Altair, got up onto his knees and scooted close enough to climb into his lap. 

“You’re mad,” Altair said.

“I want to hug you,” Malik said. He put his arms around Altair and bowed his back to rest his head on his shoulder. His heartbeat was steady-not-erratic and his hands were loose-not-tight. The heat of his body was comforting not suffocating so Altair put his arms around him. “I love you,” Malik said. 

“You’re still mad.”

Malik shrugged. “I won’t be forever.” His voice was very quiet and very close to Altair’s neck. “I’ve never had to share you before. I’m trying to be very civil, right now. You should probably hug me and let me work through this.”

Altair nodded.

\--

Ezio punched him two mornings later when they met for their run. He had taken off one morning for a hangover and one for an early-morning ‘date’ with some girl he called ‘Cristina’ and Altair had forgiven him only because Malik had gone with the first day and woken him up with sex the second. But also because Ezio never bothered to call girls by their name, but referred them by some distinctive characteristic or the time they planned to meet.

“You told him,” Ezio said after he hit him in the arm hard enough to actually hurt.

“He asked,” Altair said.

Ezio threw his hands up and mumbled something in Italian that sounded insulting but not necessarily vicious. Then he said, “at least he understands that I didn’t actually do anything. He just said, ‘don’t take it personally if I’m mad at you’.”

Altair was actually impressed and from the way Ezio was smiling he was as well. “I met Leonardo.”

“Ah.”

“He is pretty,” Altair offered. He thought about saying anything else (he’s so in love with you it’s painful) but there was a pinch of pain at the edge of Ezio’s face that looked like he knew it already. So Altair said, “I’m not certain he’s a genius. But he is pretty.”

Ezio laughed, “let’s get started. I want to have time to shower and die before I have to get to my first class.” 

\--

Altair did not sweat nearly as much as Malik-and-Ezio sweated. (It could have something to do with how slowly he had to run to keep pace with them or how they cried uncle and quit very early on in the run.) He was damp but Ezio was dripping sweat from his eyebrows and the tips of his hair and angrily complaining about the smell of his own body as he mopped his face with the collar of his shirt. 

Malik looked up when they came in and looked sleep-wrinkled and pleased with himself at having slept through such a waste of time as exercise. He stretched under the blankets and tossed the book he’d been reading to the side before he held out his arm and curled his fingers at Altair. 

Ezio forbade them from having sex before he went into the shower and Malik rolled his eyes and pulled Altair under the blankets with him. 

\--

Altair still hated Desmond, though. Desmond was still reasonably frightened of him, but he liked Ezio and didn’t run for his life when he saw Malik so much as grunt irritably and grab his ‘overnight bag’ as he headed out the door.

“I like him,” Malik said because the room was empty all except them. But in the minute-after he didn’t even remember Desmond had ever-been-there at all. 

\--

Another thing was, Altair had gotten used to being hated. It stopped bothering him when he stopped caring about what-they-thought. Or maybe it stopped when he learned how to hurt someone without leaving any marks behind, when he’d pinned that boy-at-the-playground down and listened to his whimpering apologies and promises to never-do-it-again. 

At ten, Altair was immune to hatred (so he thought) but that was before he found the boy with the cigarettes on the playground, sitting on the swings staring at the ground. He walked up to him and said, “what’s wrong with you?”

The kid looked at him but he wasn’t scared, not the way the others had been scared of him before. He looked wary but weary and got up off the swing to square his little shoulders and stare him down. “What’s it to you?” he demanded.

“I’ll make you tell me,” Altair said. He hadn’t slept (well) in days while Malik sailed on in exalted joy at his own accomplishments. The school had suspended the kid and Kadar had been reinstated as one of the good boys, but Altair-couldn’t-sleep. He couldn’t-stop-thinking about the kid. 

“Yeah, I’d like to see you try.” The kid tried to hit him and Altair kicked his legs out and pinned him to the ground with a straight-hard arm across his throat. The others had been wriggling in fear of him, but this kid just looked at him like he was waiting for the inevitable.

“Tell me,” Altair said. He didn’t move away completely, just enough to let the kid move if he wanted. They regarded one another a moment and Altair thought-enviously-of-words that he wished he could have used. He thought of his Grandmother when she held him and sang to him, thought that she could have gotten this boy to tell her his secret.

“It’s my Dad, mostly. What about you?”

Altair moved back, sat on the ground next to the kid and tugged at his shirt to show his belly and his side, where the old bruises were changing colors and the new ones were still pink around the edges. Altair got shoved over and kicked-hit-and-spit on and then the kid was running-for-it. 

His Grandmother listened to his every-word while she cleaned his split lip and his scrapped elbows and then made a phone call. Altair didn’t see the kid again but he remembered his face and the spitting fury of his hands and feet when they hit him.

\--

“I’m staying at your house for spring break,” Malik announced when he came back into his room after the phone call he’d answered ended in a long-litany of hardly-whispered Arabic. He had excused himself into the hall while Ezio looked questioningly after him long enough for Altair to KO him.

“Mine?” Ezio asked.

“It’s a very nice house,” Altair said, “his sister is frightening though.”

Ezio laughed at that.

“Well I was talking about Altair’s but you know, anyone but my parents is good.” Malik threw his phone on his bed and crawled back up to sit next to Altair and picked up his book. “You think your Grandma would mind?”

“Oh yes, for the first time since I met you she will object to you spending time at our house.” Ezio killed him and Altair set the controller in his lap long enough to look at put an arm around Malik and kiss him. Malik hugged him back and held on for a second-too-long. “She might mind all the sex.”

Malik snorted. 

Ezio said, “you make me sick.” He turned off the game and put the controllers before he went rifling through his stuff for clean clothes. “No sex until I’m out of the room.” He made it sound so-very-threatening in a distant and unimportant way as he headed into the bathroom to change.

Malik rolled his eyes and pulled Altair down over him. “I think we’re not obligated to be naked before he gets out of the bathroom.” He had Altair stripped to his underwear before Ezio came out and shouted objections at them.

“After all I do for you!” was what Ezio shouted as he slammed the door shut. “Use lots of lube!” was what he shouted in the hallway before an echo of nervous laughter from other people. 

“He’s your friend,” Malik told him. He looked comfortable and blushing-pink on his back under Altair. He had taken his own shirt off but was completely-dressed-otherwise. There was a decidedly attractive quality to his skin when they were all-by-themselves. Altair just wanted to put his mouth all over him. 

“He has compelling ideas,” Altair said. “I feel we should investigate them further.”

“We should,” Malik agreed, “on his bed.”

And if Altair agreed, it was only because Malik-was-hot-as-hell.


End file.
